CONTENTS

Preface ............................ P· 4

Introduction
Today's Epigones Who Try
to Truncate Marx's Capital P· 9

Chapters Five through

Eight of Marxism and Freedom

The Impact of the Civil War on

the Structure of Capital p. 26

The Paris Commune Illuminates and

Deepens the Content of Capital . . p. 37

The Humanism and Dialectic of

Capital, Volume I, 1867-1887 p. 48

The Logic and Scope of Capital,

Volumes II and III p. 71

Appendix
Tony Cliff Reduces Lenin's
Theory to "Uncanny Intuition" p. 100

3
 PREFACE
by Harry McShane

I T IS CERTAINLY a compliment to be asked to write a Preface to

another work by the tireless, sincere and scholarly author, Raya
Dunayevskaya. She never lets up in her efforts to unearth and make use
of what is basic in Marxist theory and to tie that up with the practical
tasks that must be undertaken in order to extricate mankind from the
prison of capitalism that stands in the way of human development. This
work comes at a time when too many of our fellow human beings
have become deplorably indifferent about the future of humanity. The
only school of thought that points to a future for mankind is that of
Marxism. It must, however, be Marxism resurrected from the bog of
futility and obscurity into which it was put by leaders who used it as
nothing more than a label.
Retrogression is visible in industry, politics, and without a doubt,
in the field of theory. The more often our political guides use the word
"strategy," the clearer it becomes that they are dazed by the problems
that they find insoluble. Retrogression gets deeper in modem society.
That is why Raya Dunayevskaya calls for urgency; a call directed to
the masses, the only force that can bring retrogression to an end and
open up the way to human emancipation. The choice is between the
downhill road of human degradation, on the one hand, and human
development on the other. The future rests with the masses.

The thought of the transformation of society coming from the

masses is an indispensable element of Marxist theory fully expressed
in the writings of both Marx and Lenin. Those who dispute it have
shut their eyes to the facts of history. Raya Dunayevskaya refers to the
Paris Commune and how it affected Marx. The new kind of order
initiated by the people of Paris won the admiration of Marx. What Marx
said about this exciting historical episode should be read by all who
would like to probe the depth of Marx's revolutionary thinking. It was
in the Commune that the act of self-government by the masses was
initiated in such a way as to influence Marx, and, some years later,
Lenin, the leader of the Russian Revolution. Bringing to life the admira-
tion expressed by Marx, the author says, "The armed people smashed
parliamentarianism. The people's assembly was not to be a parliamentary
talking shop but a working body."
One is tempted to devote more space to the Paris Commune than is
permissible here, but the question must be put: Who, before reading the
points made by Raya Dunayevskaya,. suspected that the Paris Commune
had any bearing on Marx's Capital? Labour, as she says, was released
from the confines of value production "which robs the workers of all
4
individuality and reduces them merely to a component of labour in
general." The author points out that new additions were introduced into
the French edition of Capital. Marx makes the point himself. Before
leaving this reference to the Paris Commune, it seems appropriate here
to recall that Lenin, writing in 1919, accused leading socialists in Ger-
many of failing "to understand the significance of Soviet, or proletarian
democracy, in relation to the Paris Commune, its place in history, its
necessity as a form of the dictatorship of the proletariat." Lenin, of
course, said much more than that on the Paris Commune, and attached
great importance to it.

When Raya Dunayevskaya writes of change coming from below

she thinks not only of the world in which Marx lived; she relates the
basic philosophy of Marx to the world of conflict in which we live and
sees there the choice facing humanity. The dangers that confront us are
so serious that unless some force exists that is capable of transforming
society we may as well throw our hands up in despair. The force
produced by the history and economics of capitalism is the proletariat
on which rests the realization of the universal desire for freedom innate
in the make-up of every member of the human race. This concept of
movement confirms what the author attributes to Hegel and Marx. There
is little fear of her meeting with serious opposition in that. When con-
necting Marx with Hegel on dialectical movement, as she does in all her
works, she has the support of Marx himself.
There is something else that connects Marx with Hegel; it is some-
thing that Marx took from Hegel, but found it a reality in capitalist
production. The word "alienation" has found its way into the vocabu-
lary of many Marxists, but, too often, is passed over lightly and often
forgotten. It is important that the process of exploitation under capital-
ism be understood by all, but there is much more than that in Capital
if we look for it. Raya Dunayevskaya renders a service by re-producing
the chapters on all three volumes of Marx's Capital that formed part of
her book, Marxism and Freedom. These chapters had an enlightening
effect on the writer of this Preface. It became clear that there is more
in Marx's Capital than economics. It would be marvelous if rank and file
members of the labour movement could all be persuaded to read these
chapters.
The process of exploitation on which capitalism rests is shown in
the early chapters of Capital, but too many readers of that work thought
that sufficient, not knowing that the philosophy that drove him along
finds expression there. There is the picture of how the worker is dom-
inated by the products of his labour plus the picture of the road to
freedom. Freedom, above all else, is what Marx is concerned about.
Raya Dunayevskaya gives emphasis to what Marx meant when referring
to the division of labour, the domination of the worker by the machine
and "the fragmentation of man."
5
 Now that a new interest is developing, here in Britain, in Marxist
education, one would hope that use will he made of this particular
section of Raya Dunayevskaya's work. It is well to recall the fact that,
for many years, Marxist economics featured strongly as part of the
curriculum in classes of the Labour movement. John Maclean was said
to have the largest class in Europe on Marxist economics - when he was
not in prison for his political activities.
We are no longer justified in regarding Marx as just a brilliant
economist. The philosophy that runs through Capital, was deep-rooted in
Marx and actuated him through his life. It dates from the days when he
called himself a Humanist - before he wrote the Communist Manifesto
along with Engels. The author pulls the writings of Marx together and
views the world situation from the Marxist-Humanist viewpoint. With
Marx she sees Communism as only the beginning; as a stage mediating
the higher development of man as a result of his own creative activities.
This viewpoint necessitates a look at Russia where, in 1917, the greatest
stride towards the goal of Communism was taken.
Before anyone else, Raya Dunayevskaya, who had been in the revolu-
tionary movement for years, boldly declared that "Russia had marched
in the opposite direction to that set by Lenin and his fellow Bolsheviks.
She made an original analysis of the economy of Russia in support of
her contention that Russia had been completely transformed into a state-
capitalist society. She led a minority to the Trotskyist movement on this
issue. The regime in Russia has nothing in common with the Marxist
aim of human liberation or the call of Marx for "the development of
human power which is its own end." State-capitalism is a rapidly grow·
ing trend throughout the world, with the result that the democratic pre-
tence of the rulers is becoming more apparent. The banner of liberation
must be raised by the people below. It is this aim that gives purpose
to this work by Raya Dunayevskaya.
It seems remarkable that it is the elements of Marxist thought ignored
for many years by Marxist theorists that the author sees as important
i£ we are to understand either Marx or Lenin. Why Marxist writers
tried to minimize the significance of Marx's acknowledgement to Hegel
is difficult to understand. Revolutionaries may not know it, hut through
Marx we all owe a debt to Hegel. We are enriched by his discovery
of dialectics even if Hegel confined it to the world of thought. It is
just as puzzling why so little has been said by the same writers about
Lenin making a study of Hegel after the collapse of the Second Inter-
national in 1914. In his Philosophic Notebooks, Lenin saw that thought
in the mind of the human being can be creative. As against the old
type of materialism expounded by many Marxist writers, to Lenin
dialectics was the proof of working people changing society. The
reluctance of Marxists to give sufficient attention to the Humanist Essays
that Marx produced in 1844 is likewise puzzling. This abundance of
6
material is presented by the author to give fresh meaning to Marxism.
Just as Marx and Lenin would, the author repudiates any suggestion
that theory and practice can be separated. They are related dialectically.
The present situation should bring about their higher unity; this is the
author's purpose. She has identified herself with the concrete struggles
for freedom in East Europe, in Africa and in America. She has thrown
herself into the Women's Liberation movement now gathering strength,
just as she has participated actively in the Black movement for more
than a quarter of a century.
In this new work, as in all she writes, she makes visible the banner
of freedom. What is basic for her is the curtailment of freedom under
the present social order. The how and why of it is explained in the
chapters on Marx's Capital. It is important that these chapters be read
by all interested in the industrial disputes and the problem of unemploy-
ment. Why is it that in Britain while the balance of payments is im-
proved by the flow of North Sea oil, the number of unemployed has
jumped to a record figure? What produces the problem of investment?
What events caused Marx to make changes in the structure of Capital?
The recent virulent racialism and openly Nazi National Front ac-
tivity in Britain are today compelling even the bureaucratic Labour
leaders to take a second look at Marx's famous statement: "Labour in
the white skin cannot be free so long as labour in the Black skin is
branded." This was neither beautiful rhetoric, nor intended only for
the U.S. audience. It is so relevant to our day and age on both sides of
the Atlantic that ours is the generation that can fully understand Marx's
restructuring of Capital under the impact of the Civil War in the U.S.
and the consequent struggles for the shortening of the working day both
in Great Britain and in the U.S.
The top politicians who have been tinkering with the economic prob-
lems plaguing this society have long since given up hope of getting any
solution from the writings of the late Lord Keynes or anyone else. They
would do well to read Raya Dunayevskaya on Karl Marx.
There is nothing dull in her writing. The reader feels that he
or she is being allowed to see the picture. The road - the only road
to freedom and human emancipation - is there for all to see, even if it
is hard and up-hill.

Glasgow, Scotland
October 31, 1977

7
 Introductory Note

There is now available to the English-speaking public, in

a new Pelican edition, a more accurate and beautiful
translation of Marx's Capital, Vol. I, by Ben Fowkes.
The relevance of Marx's work to an analysis of today's
global crisis, and the need to answer the vulgarization of
Marx's Capital contained in the Introduction by the Trot-
skyist-Marxist, Ernest Mandel, makes the publication of
this pamphlet especially urgent. The British and United
States Marxist-Humanists therefore asked me to write
a special Introduction to the republication of the four
chapters on the three volumes of Capital that first ap-
peared in Marxism and Freedom, herein reproduced
exactly as originally written in 1957, except, in the case
of footnotes, ( 1) page references to the Kerr edition of
Capital, Vol. I, will also include the corresponding pagin-
ation of the new Pelican edition; (2) the expansion with
new material of several footnotes; and 13) a new post-
scriptum added directly top. 40, Chapter VI, on the Paris
Commune. The reproduced chapters follow the pagination
of this pamphlet. I have also appended a critique of Tony
Cliff. - R.D.

8
 AUTHOR'S SPECIAL INTRODUCTION
Today's Epigones Who Try to
Truncate Marx's Capitalt
by Raya Dunayevskaya, author of
Philosophy and Revolution: From Hegel to Sartre,
aml from Marx to Mao and Marxism and Freedom,
From 1776 Until Today
Accumulate, accumulate! That is the Moses and
the prophets! . . . Accumulation for the sake of
accumulation, production for the sake of production:
this was the formula in which classical economics
expressed the historical mission of the bourgeoisie
in the period of its domination. Not for one instant
did it deceive itself over the nature of wealth's
birth· pangs.
Marx, Capital
If Marx did not leave behind him ai "Logic" (with
a capital letter), he did leave the logic of Capital
. . . the history of capitalism and the analysis of
the concepts summing it up.
Lenin
It has often been claimed - and not without a cer-
tain justification-that the famous chapter in Hegel's
Logic treating of Being, Non-Being, and Becoming
contains the whole of his philosophy. It might be
claimed with perhaps equal justification that the
chapter dealing with the fetish character of the
commodity contains within itself the whole of his-
torical materialism ... 2
Lukacs

1 The Pelican Marx Library edition of Vol. I of Marx's Capital (Penguin Books,
London, 1976) includes as "Appendix" the first English translation of the famous
"Sixth Chapter" of Capital from the Marx-Engels Archives, Vol. II (VII).
2 History and Class Consciousness, p. 170. See my article "Lukacs' Philosophic
Dimension" in News & Letters, Feb. and March, 1973. See also Lucien Goldmann's
speech, "The Dialectic Today," given at the 1970 Korcula, Yugoslavia Summer
School (published posthumously in the collection of essays Cultural Creation in
Modern Society, Telos Press, 1976). The speech acknowledges the correct chron-
ological as well as philosophic "recovery" of Hegelian categories in Marxism and
their actualization in the period 1917-23, by correctly stating that first came
Lenin's Philosophic Notebooks, second came Lukacs' History and Class Conscious·
ness, third was Gramsci. All others - from Plekhanov to Kautsky, from Mehring
to even Lenin prior to 1914 - were simply acting as positivists whose "academic
science" was materialism. Goldmann adds that it was not accidental, because 1917
actualized the dialectic, and 1923, with the defeat of the German revolution,
signalled the end of the dialectical renaissance.
9
M ARX'S GREATEST theoretical work, Capital, has once again
marched onto the present historic stage even among bourgeois
ideologues, since there is no other way to understand today's global
economic crisis. Thus, Business Week (6-23-75) suddenly started quot-
ing what Marx was saying on the decline in the rate of profit as endemic
to capitalism. It even produced official graphs from the Federal Reserve
Board, the Department of Commerce, Data Resources, Inc., as.well as its
own data, all of which goes to show that the post-World War II boom
has ended in a slump in the rate of profit. They have stopped laughing
long enough at Marx's alleged "false economic theories" to show that,
not just in theory, hut in fact, Marx's analysis of "the law of motion of
capitalism" to its collapse, "insofar as a decline in the rate of profit"
is concerned, is reality.
While, with the "economic upturn" in 1975, the authors hoped it
was only a "passing phenomenon," by the end of 1976 (12-27-76),
Business Week didn't sound quite so optimistic. Thus, while it still
gloated over the 30 percent increase in net profits, it, could not skip
over the following determinates:
(1) the low rate of growth; (2) the hardly moveable high rate of
unemployment of 7 percent officially, which does not change the truth
that this is "average," hut among Black youth it is at the fantastic
rate of 34.1 percent; (3) the volatile undercurrent 'of dissatisfaction in
the relationship between the underdeveloped countries and ,the indus-
trialized lands to whom they are indebted at an impossible-to-meet $60
billion; (4) hard-core inflation of 6 percent as against the 1-2 percent
inflation characteristic of most of the 1960s. Moreover, this "hardcore
inflation" is actually not what it is, hut what it is hoped it will be
brought down to; and ( 5) the unevenness of growth within the country,
which shows that so basic an industry as steel has undergone· a 17 per-
cent drop in growth. At the same time, so bleak is the international
outlook that Business Week, in summing up the outlook, cannot exclude
even depression: "If Washington fails, fears of new world depression
will intensify." ,
The capitalists may not he ready to "agree" with Marx, that the
supreme commodity, labor-power, is the only source of all value and
surplu& value, hut they do see that there is such a decline in the rate
of profit compared to what they consider necessary to keep investing
for expanded production, that they are holding off - so much so that
now their ideologists are saying low investment is hy no means a tem-
porary factor that the capitalists would "overcome" with the next boom.
There is to be no next boom. It is. this which makes them look both at
the actual structural changes - overwhelming preponderance of 'constant
capital (machinery) over variable capital (living labor employed) -
as well as the world production and its interrelations.
10
 Thus, the "miracle" of post-World War II West Germany has
stopped, as has the "miracle" of Japan. The Financial Post3 ran a special
piece on "West Germany: The Troubled Giant" pointing to the fact that
there is a visible crack in the "social peace" (though the government
got organized labor not to demand "extraordinary" wage increases).
Not only that, but the nuclear issue, besides encountering U.S. opposition
to West Germany's nuclear reactor sales to Brazil, produced at home
such massive anti-nuclear demonstrations that even the German courts
had to ban further nuclear power stations "until the issue of waste
disposal had been resolved." Meanwhile, actual capital investment in
real, rather than inflated, prices has fallen for three years in a row -
and unemployment keeps increasing.
As for Great Britain and Italy, no significant recovery has yet
begun. With oil revenue expectations, prospects may not be as grim for
Britain as for Italy, but unemployment there has now officially reached
1.4 million - highest since the Depression. Prime Minister Callaghan
immediately admitted that he could see only more unemployment in
the immediate future, as public spending cuts demanded by the Inter-
national Monetary Fund take effect. In Italy, inflation is currently run-
ning at 20 percent, and oil price increases have so devastated the economy,
that no growth at all is forecast for 1977. Other forecasts - in Europe,
and in the underdeveloped world - are either only marginally better,
or worse.
By 1977, it was not only an academic - the serious bourgeois
economist, Simon Kuznets - who, ever since the end of World War II,
maintained that the "emergence of the violent Nazi regime in one of the
most economically developed countries of the world raises grave questions
about the institutional basis of modern economic growth - if it is sus-
ceptible to such a barbaric deformation as a result of transient diffi-
culties."4 It was a high Western government leader, none less than the
President of France, Giscard d'Estaing, in 1977 who questioned the sur-
vival of the capitalistic system. Solzhenitsyn-inspired, retrogressionist
intellectuals complain that capitalism has seen the emergence of a "strange
siren whose body is capital and whose head is Marxist."5

3 Financial Post, Special Report: "West Germany: The Troubled Giant," by

Peter Foster (Toronto, 9-17-77).
4 Simon Kuznets, Postwar Economic Growth. See also his Capital in the
American Economy.
5 The Barbarism with a Human Face calling itself "The New Philosophy" by
its guru, Bernard-Henri Levy, hails from the same famous university that produced
Althusser in the early 1960s, and in the mid-1970s had produced this Solzhenitsyn-
inspired elitism with the ex-Althusserite, Andre Glucksman, who now calls Solzhen-
itsyn "the Shakespeare of our time." Their works have not yet appeared in
English, but a preview of them can be read in The Manchester Guardian (6-26-77),
"Despairing Voice of France's Lost Generation," by Walter Schwarz. As against
this critique, the "Le Monde" section of The Manchester Guardian (7-10-77)
published a panegyric by Philippe Sollers.
11
 But U.S. governmental statistics show good cause for those capital-
istic headaches: the biggest increase in poverty since 1959 occurred in
1975 and has persisted. No less than a rise of 10 percent in the number
of poor, totaling now 25.9 millions, are below poverty level. That means
that no less than 12 percent of all Americans had an income of less
than $5,500 annually for a family of four.
That this - the fifth post·World War II recession - is so hard to
come out of, has brought the capitalists themselves face·to·face with the
reality that the overriding fact of present-day capitalist economy is the
decline in the rate of profit as well as poverty, unemployment and
stagnation.

I T IS THE AGE of state-capitalism as a world phenomenon. This

development has no more solved its deep economic crisis than when
full state·capitalism came to a single nation, Russia, China, etc. As for
inflation, it is true that the deep recession, which was triggered by the
quadrupled oil prices after the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, was by no means
the only reason for the double· digit inflation, any more than that "sickness
in the economy" could be ascribed, as Big Capital wishes to ascribe it, to
workers' wages. The overwhelming reality is this: Just as monopoly
growth inhibited national economic growth, so the oil cartel has actually
lowered world economic growth.
As opposed to the 1950s and early 1960s, when Western Europe
held attractions for capitalism with its cheaper labor and latest tech-
nology, in the 1970s U.S. capital has added a new incentive for world
capital: a safe haven for its investments, now that European capital has
decided the U.S. proletariat is not as revolutionary as the European
workers. As against the oil monopolists who are spending their billions
on buying Western technology and military hardware, and whose actual
investments in the U.S. are not directed to the capital goods market,
West German, French and British capital is. However, so deep is the
economic crisis in the U.S. and in the world that such European invest-
ment in the U.S. is likewise only a palliative, even as the massive super-
profitable investments upholding apartheid South Africa6 cannot sub-

6 A single glance at U.S. investments in South Africa shows them to be both

massive and growing. Where, a decade ago, U.S. companies had $600 million in-
vested in that apartheid land, it has skyrocketed to no less than $1.46 billion in
1974 (the last year for which data is available). Further projects are being built by
Kennecott Copper and Caltex Petroleum (owned jointly by Standard Oil of
California and Texaco, Inc.). Moreover, some Canadian-sounding names are mainly
American-owned, as witness Quebec Iron & Titanium, two-thirds owned by Kenne-
cott and one-third by Gulf and Western Industries, which has a 39 percent interest
in a proposed $290 million mining and smelting complex. As one State Department
official explained, "the large and growing role" (no less than 15 percent of total
foreign investment in South Africa is U.S.!) of U.S. investments is because "busi-
nessmen don't have to fear their operations in South Africa are going to be
nationalized ... "
12
stitute for the insufficient investment capital and plant expansion in
the U.S.
Thus, Lawrence A. Veit, International Economist and Deputy Man·
ager at Brown Brothers, Harriman & Co. (not to mention his previous
position as economist at the State and Treasury Departments), openly
speaks of a "premature cyclical downturn"7 rather than what Ernest
Mandel calls "the generalized economic recession coming to an end in
1975."8 Further, Veit points not only to the economic problems, but
"the changing attitudes to work itself among the younger generation."
Here it can already be seen that serious bourgeois analysts do see that
the question of Alienated Labor is not "just theory." It is concrete.
It is urgent. It affects the "premature cyclical downturn."
The deep recession, in the U.S. and globally, is by no means over,
though some who consider themselves Marxists like Mandel think that
it has come "to an end in 1975." The false consciousness that has per-
meated even economists who are revolutionaries emanates from the fact
that capitalism has, in the post-World War II period, come up with ways
of keeping the economy going, stopping short of the type of Great Depres-
sion, 1929-32 (actually until 1939), that led to World War II. Since this
time it would lead to World War III, it is "unthinkable," because it
would, of necessity, be a nuclear war that would end civilization as we
have known it.9
Under these circumstances, consider the irony of a famous Trotskyist
economist, Ernest Mandel, who holds that the present deep recession
"has come to an end."10 Under the guise of praising "the validity of
parts of Marx's Capital [which] extend also into the future," Mandel
hangs upon Marx's shoulders his (Mandel's) analysis of state-capitalist
monstrosities as "not yet fully-fledged classless, that is socialist, societies:
the USSR and the People's Republics of Eastern Europe, China, North
Vietnam, North Korea and Cuha."11

7 Foreign Affairs, January, 1977, "A Troubled World Economy."

8 Ernest Mandel, "A Hesitant, Uneven and Inflationary Upturn," Intercontin-
ental Press, 11-29-76.
9 Even that "unthinkable" war is now flirted with by the U.S. rulers with the
latest horrifying approval by the Carter Administration of the neutron bomb. As
I wrote in the 1977-78 Perspectives Thesis: Nothing in Hitler's Germany, from the
"secret weapon" with which Hitler threatened world destruction, to the actual
genocide he practiced within his domain, is any match for the actual military
technology now in the hands of the superpowers, U.S. especially. What dehumanized
creature could compete with the super·scientist-military-industrial complex of
State Planners which dares describe a bomb as "clean" because, though this
neutron bomb can mass kill by radiation, it leaves property intact! (See "Time Is
Running Out," News & Letters, Aug.-Sept. 1977.)
10 Intercontinental Press, 11-29-76.
11 Ernest Mandel's Introduction to the Pelican Marx Library edition of Vol.
I of Marx's Capital, p. 16. All other references to the Introduction and to Vol. I
will include the pagination directly in my text.
13
 That this can pass muster with Penguin Books "in association with
New Left Review" which is the editor of their Pelican Marx Library
speaks volumes for the sad state of today's scholarship. Whether, in this
case, the choice of Mandel has come about by virtue of his name as
author of Marxist Economic Theory, or otherwise, is their problem, not
ours. Elsewhere I had already criticized that work. There 12 I have
shown that, while bourgeois ideologues were enamored with Mandel's
statement that he had "strictly abstained from quoting the sacred texts,"
it was not true, as The Economist claimed, that it was because Mandel
replaced "Marx's Victorian facts and statistics by contemporary empirical
material." Rather, it was because Mandel tailended the Keynesian
theory of "effective demand." Here what concerns us is not so much
Mandel's "Marxist analysis of contemporary material" as Mandel's utter
perversion of nothing short of Marx's monumental work, Capital.
Capitalism's ways of containing its economic crises within recession
level, rather than uncontrollable Depression, is judged by Mandel to be a
"stabilizer," even though it is precisely that type of concept that led to
the collapse of the established Marxist (Second) International with the
outbreak of the First World War. Where that shocking event had Lenin
return to Marx's origins in Hegel, and the dialectic of transformation
into opposite, today's Marxists plunge not only into the latest series of
economic "facts" sans any dialectical r'udder, but also to a violation of
the dialectical structure of Marx's Capital itself. That, too, is not "just
theory," but that which gives, or could give when not violated, action
its direction.
It becomes necessary, therefore, not to limit onesel£ to the economic-
political data of the year, but have that data he a new beginning for the
battle of ideas which refuses to be shifted back and forth empirically
between the theoretical and the practical and vice versa, both reduced
to the immediate level. Bereft of Hegelian-Marxist13 dialectics, not to
mention the strict relationship of workers' revolt against the "Accumulate,
accumulate!" exploitative relationship, one can hardly escape trying to
hem in the analysis of today's crises within the hounds of bourgeois -
private and state - ideology, and thus inflict structuralism and the
latest twist in pragmatism on Marx's greatest original work, Capital.

12 See "'True Rebirth' or Wholesale Revision of Marxism?", News & Letters,

May and June·July, 1970.
13 I hyphenate Hegelian-Marxian, not to state my own view and thus taunt
the vulgar materialist·scientists like Althusser and Mandel, but because in the
very section of Marx's own Postface ro the second edition of Capital, to which
Mandel refers to "prove" that Marx was a materialist, not "idealist,'' dialectician,
Marx writes: "The mystification which the dialectic suffers in Hegel's hands by
no means prevents him from being the first to present its general forms of motion
in a comprehensive and conscious manner" ( p. 103). And within the text itself,
as we know, Marx further stresses that Hegelian dialectics is the "source of all
dialectics."
14
I N OUR DAY, we have the situation where a new French tr~nslation
of Capital is introduced by that official Communist-structuralist,
Louis Althusser, who stooped to pseudo-psychoanalysis 'to express his
venom against Marx's Critique of the Hegelian Dialectic as "the pro-
digious 'abreaction' indispensable to the liquidation of his [Marx's]
'disordered' cmisciousness."14 And, for the English world, the beautiful
new translation of Capital is, as we saw, burdened with an introduction
by the Trotskyist epigone, Ernest Mandel, who spreads himself over
some 75 pages of "Introduction."
From the very beginning - in the first section Mandel dares entitle
"The Purpose of Capital" - he does not merely peddle his view of
Russia as "socialist," and does not only seek to disjoint the "scientific"
from its revolutionary content, but unashamedly hooks these views to
"the distinction" Marx drew between "utopian and scientific socialism,"
as i£ Marx would not have stopped short of tolerating forced labor camps!
That the two - the new edition of Marx's Capital, and analyses
of today's global crises - do not hang apart, but are integrally related,
is clear enough. What is clearer still is that Mandel is presenting, not
Marx's views, but his own. No wonder he also sees "stabilizers" in pri-
vate capitalism's development, though, as revolutionary, he wishes that
overthrown. Vulgarization of Marxism has its own dialectic. It is neces-
sary, therefore, to disentangle Marx from Mandel, to remain rooted in
Marx's philosophy of liberation as a totality, and to face with sober senses
the alienated world reality that must be uprooted i£ we are to release
the revolutions-to-be from the crisis-ridden state-capitalist age.
It is not a question of needing "to know" Marx's Capital "in
order correctly" to be able to analyze today's global crises. Rather, it is
that today's economic crises compel one not to separate economics from
politics, and not only as the capitalists naturally do from their class
point of view, but objectively as the antagonistic relationships at the
point of production are seen to produce market crises created in
production.
Thus, it is not just that the "investment drought" is a great deal
more than just "hesitant." What is interesting in the Foreign Affairs
analysis of "The Troubled World Economy" is that it recognizes that
inseparable from that pivotal "investment drought," even when there is
some growth, is the rise in energy cost which means that, along with
the rising cost of automated equipment, too much value is invested, com-

14 For Marx, p. 35. Althusser's new Preface to the French edition of Capital,
Vol. I., is reproduced in the British Pdition of Lenin and Philosophy and Other
Essays, pp. 69-101. See also my "Critique of Althusser's Anti-HegPlianism,"
News & Letters, Oct. 1969.
15
pared to labor productivity, when so little living labor is being used in
production. Therefore it is telling "the West" not to be overly happy
with their "petro-recyclers," that is to say, Big Capital's way of getting
those oil billions from the four-fold increase of prices hack from the
Middle East potentates, and into its own hands by selling machinery and
military hardware.
The point is that the recession is so deep, so internal, as well as so
linked with the world market, that the highly industrialized countries are
not programming great expenditures for new plants and equipment. This
is at a time when profits are high, and so shaky are European economies
and so great the fear of revolutions (or at least "Communists in govern-
ment"), that the U.S. has become a magnet for foreign capital investment
even as Europe was that magnet for U.S. Big Capital's investment going
abroad in the 1950s.
Finally, even bourgeois economists understand that the centerpiece,
the nerve, the muscle as well as the soul of all capitalist production is
labor - the extraction from living labor of all the unpaid hours of
labor that is the surplus value, the profits - and that, therefore, neither
the market, nor political manipulation by the state, nor control of that
crucial commodity at this moment - oil - can go on endlessly without
its relationship to the life-and-death commodity: labor power. Foreign
Affairs concludes: "cartels don't have infinite lives . . . and thus will
one day narrow the conditions between prices of energy and cost 0£
production."
One would think that so erudite an economist as Mandel knows the
relationship of value to price, and I do not doubt that abstractly he
does. But watch what he does as he hits out at Marxists who have
criticized him ior attaching too much importance to the market. He
lectures them thusly:
". . . the capitalist mode is the production of commodities . . .
this production in no way implies the automatic sale of the
commodities prruluced . ~ . the sale of commodities at prices
yielding the average rate of profit . . . in the final analysis."15
As if this vulgarization of Marx's analysis of the dialectical relation-
ship between production and its reflection in the market crisis were not
far enough a distance from Marxian "economics," Mandel reaches for
Marx's most crucial analysis of the unemplOyed army as "the absolute
general law" of capitalist production. Here is how he strips the "absolute
general law" to fit, in answer to the monetarist Prof. Brunner's bourgeois
defense of the need to lower inflation, even though its "price is unemploy-
ment":

15 Intercontinental Press, 11-29-76.

16
 "There can be no better confirmation of the analysis of Karl
Marx made in Capital, more than a century ago: in the long run
capitalism cannot survive without an industrial reserve army •.."

Though one acquainted with Mandel's economist specialization should

be accustomed to the many ways he has of turning Marx upside down,
this is enough to make one's hair stand on end. Far from saying that
capitalism "cannot survive without an industrial reserve army," Marx
says "the absolute general law of capitalist accumulation" - the un-
employed army "and the dead weight of pauperism" - would bring
capitalism down. The antagonistic character of capitalist accumulation
sounds "the knell of capitalist private property. The expropriators are
expropriated" (p. 929).

Now it isn't that Mandel doesn't "know" such ABCs of Marxism.

It is that a pragmatist's ideology is as blinding as the "science" of today's
myriad market transactions, and one extra moment's look at the market,
away from irreconcilable class contradiction at the point of production,
and the inescapable turns out to be the violation of the Marxism of Marx!
It is high time to turn to Marx's methodology in his greatest theoretical
work, Capital. It was no accident, whatever, why, precisely why, Marx
refused to deal with the market until after - some 850 pages after -
he dealt dialectically and from every possible angle with the process of
production. It is time we took a deeper look at Mandel, away from the
market, as "pure" theoretician and revolutionary.
As we showed before, Mandel, from the very first section of his
Introduction to Capital - "The Purpose of Capital" - tries to hang on
Marx a 20th-century epigone's contention that Russia is "socialist." By
the end of that section, Mandel has separated Marx's "scientific . . .
cornerstone" by still another restatement about capitalism creating "the
economic, material and social preconditions for a society of associated
producers" (p. 17). Such "rock-like foundation of scientific truth" left
out but a single word - "freely" (my emphasis). Freely is the specific
word, concept, living reality that was the determinate of Marx's "ob-
jective and strictly scientific way" not only of distinguishing his analyses
from all others, but characterizing his whole life. Marx's own words read:
"Let us finally imagine, for a change, an association of free
men, working with the means of production held in common . . .
The veil is not removed from the countenance of the social life·
process, i.e., the process of material production, until it becomes
production by freely associated men, and stands under their con-
scious and planned control." (p. 171, p. 173)

Marx's sentence is from that greatest and most concise of all sections
in Capital, on the dialectical method. Though dialectics is not only
method, but the dialectics of liberation, the last section of Chapter 1 of
17
Capital - "The Fetishism of Commodities" - makes no entrance in
Mandel's section entitled "The Method of Capital." In my text that
follows from Marxism and Freedom, I have gone into great detail on the
relationship of the historic experience of the Paris Commune to Marx's
dialectical concept of the "fetishism" of the commodity-form. Here it is
sufficient to point to the fact that neither friends nor enemies, no matter
how "new" and "independent" they thought their own philosophy to be,
(as, for instance, Sartre's Existentialism16), has denied the pivotal role
of that section to any comprehension of Marx's Capital, especially its
dialectics.
Fetishism contained Marx's very original dialectic, which, though
rooted, as is all dialectics, in the Hegelian, has a live, concrete, revolu-
tionary subject - the proletariat. This is not "a political conclusion"
tacked onto economics. Rather, it is the "variable capital" in its live form
of the wage worker who, at the point of production, is so infuriated at
the attempt to transform him into "an appendage" to a machine, that he
rises up - from strikes to outright revolutions - to uproot the old
society and create totally new, truly human relations as freely associated
men. Mandel, however, as we saw not only makes no mention of the
section on Fetishism,17 but perverts the whole concept of freedom by
reducing "freely associated men" to just "a society of associated pro-
ducers." And so proud is he of his interpretation that that phrase becomes,
literally, the final word of the whole Introduction (p. 86).

Marx, on the other hand, after devoting a lifetime to completing

Vol. I of Capital in 1867, did not feel satisfied with his concretization of
"the fetishism" of the commodity-form. It was only after the Paris
Commune, as he worked out the French edition of Capital, 1872-75,
that he reworked the section yet once again, and called attention to it
and other changes by asking all to read that edition as "it possesses a
scientific value independent of the original and should be consulted even
by readers familiar with the German" (p. 105).

A S FOR LENIN, it took nothing short of the outbreak of the First

World War and the collapse of the Second International, and
his own restudy of Hegel's Science of Logic in that cataclysmic period,
to write:

16 See Sartre's Search For A Method and Critique de la Raison Dialectique.

See also my critique "Jean-Paul Sartre: Outsider Looking In," Oiapter 6, Philosophy
and Revolution, pp. 188-210.
17 By no accident whatever, Mandel's half-sentence reference (p. 74) to the
existence of the section on "Fetishism of Commodities" is in what could be called
the sales section of his Introduction, "Marx's Theory of Money."
18
 "It is impossible completely to understand Marx's Capital, and
especially its first chapter, without having thoroughly studied and
understood the whole of Hegel's Logic. Consequently, half a
century later none of the Marxists understood Marx! !"18
Evidently, Mandel thinks he has done Lenin one better when, in
explaining dialectical method, he points to the fact that Marx's dialectical
method helps "pierce through new layers of mystery" not alone by con-
trasting appearance to essence, but in showing "why a given 'essence'
appears in given concrete forms and not in others" (p. 20). Too bad it
made Mandel think that he has pierced through that mystery, not by
sticking witli the specificity of the commodity-form, but by plunging into
"sales," to which he adds "real history." What he fails to cite is that the
real, history of that first chapter, as well as its dialectics, is exactly what,
in 1943, Stalin ordered excised in the "teaching" of Capital.19
On the contrary. Mandel skips over both the fact and the why of
Stalin's "academic" order in the midst of the holocaust and, instead, hails
as a "rebirth of true Marxism" the 1954 codification of that very revision
of the law of value in the Textbook of Political Economy. The Russians
labored 10 years before they could write as if that had always been the
interpretation of Marxian economics. Mandel begins there straightaway.
This is not because Mandel is the brilliant one. The Russians have
a 20-year priority in that field. But the Communist state-capitalists had
to, first - upon the direct orders of Stalin - make the admission that
they were changing "the teaching" of Marxian political economy. They
then had to make sure that the texts prior to 1943 did a "disappearing
act" in order, from then on, to begin writing without further ado about
the "orthodox" interpretation of the law of value. Above all, they had
to work out the consequences of the break with the structure of Capital
which reveals not only the exploitative nature but also the perversity of
capitalism: The machine is master of man, which gives rise to the
fetishistic appearance of commodities and presents the relations between,
men as if they were mere exchange of things.
Then, and only then, could the Russian theoreticians, Stalinized
and "deStalinized," write as if the startling 1943 revision was "Marx-

18 Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 38, p. 180.

19 This was first revealed in the article in Pod Znamenem Marxizma (Under
The Banner of Marxism), No. 7-8, 1943. However, the magazine did not reach
this country until 1944, at which time I translated it into English and it was pub-
lished in the American Economic Review, No. 3, 1944, under the title, "Teaching
of Economics in the Soviet Union." See also Will Lissner in the New York Times,
Oct. 1, 1944. The controversy in this country, on the startling reversal in Marxian
teachings, continued in the pages of the American Economic Review for an entire
year. See especially Paul Baran's "New Trends in Russian Economic Thinking,"
December, 1944. My rebuttal, "Revision or Reaffirmation of Marxism," American
Economic Review, No. 3, appeared in September, 1945.
19
ism." It isn't that the erudite Mandel hadn't "read" the controversies.
Rather, the loss of memory was planned for purposes of presenting a
"true rebirth": "After Stalin's death, and especially after the effects of
Khrushchev's reforms had been exhausted, Soviet economic thought un-
derwent a true rebirth."20
Mandel's "real history" turns out to be a complete jumble - "pre-
suppositions," plus mixing up dead and living labor: "Commodity pro-
duction as a basic and dominant feature of economic life presupposes
capitalism, that is a society in which labor-power and instruments of
labor have themselves become commodities" (p. 21, my emphasis).
Turning Marx so far upside down that "instruments of labor" are on the
same level as the difjerentia specifica of capitalism - labor power as
a commodity - cannot but lead to his climactic separation of logic and
history: "In that sense it is true that the analysis of Vol. I of Capital
is logical (based upon dialectical logic) and not historical" (p. 21).
Now Marx methodologically left the genuine historic origins of
capitalism to the end of the volume, so that its tendency - law of
motion, not, as Mandel would have it, laws of motion - should not
become a matter of diverting us from what is the result of strict, com-
modity-production capitalism, no matter how that "first dollar," so to
speak, was obtained. Just as trying to take Chapter 1 out of its structural
order (as Stalin felt compelled to do in 1943 as he prepared to make sure
that the workers in post-World War II Russia would work hard and
harder) was a total violation of the dialectical structure of Marx's
Capital, so, too, is Mandel's mixing up the "real history" of the rise
of capitalism instead of presenting it dialectically. Marx moved it to
the end, not because there is a division between history and dialectics,
but because dialectics contains both, and, therefore, the discernment of
the law of motion of capitalist production, strict commodity production,
could be grasped best when one limited oneself to capitalist production
and capitalist production alone.
Marx never tired of repeating that his original contribution was
the split in the category of labor - abstract and concrete labor; labor
as activity and labor-power as commodity; labor as not only the source
of all value which includes surplus value, but the subject who would
uproot it. So "single purpose" a revolutionary theoretician was Marx
in all his multitudinous and basic discoveries that, though he devoted
some 850 pages (it is over 1,000 pages in the Pelican edition which in-
cludes the famous heretofore unpublished "Chapter 6" of the Archives)
in Vol. I to that question, he no sooner started Vol. II than he repeated:
"The peculiar characteristic is not that the commodity labor-power is
saleable, but that labor-power appears in the shape of a commodity."21

20 Ernest Mandel, Marxist Economic Theory, p. 726.

21 Capital, Vol. II, p. 37.
20
 Mandel, however, is convinced that - once he has "explained" what
he calls "historic dimension"22 as being the opposite of the eternal; and
contrasted appearance to essence where nevertheless appearance is signi-
ficant; and then separated logical from historical where nevertheless "the
logical analysis does reflect some basic trends of historical development
after all" (p. 22) - he has thereby been faithful to Marx, as against
those "from Bernstein to Popper" who called for the "removal of the
dialectical scaffolding" as "mystical." Mandel thereupon plunges into
"The Plan of Capital," as if that were only a matter of dates and pages,
instead of the actual restructuring of Capital on the basis of what did
come not only historically, hut from below.
What Marx did, in restructuring Capital, was based on these
struggles from below - the workers' struggle for the 8-hour day and
the Civil War in France where the Paris Communards had "stormed
the heavens." There was no State Plan, no State Property, no Party. The
Commune's greatest achievement, he concluded, was "its own working
existence" (my emphasis).
But what does Mandel choose to illustrate what a commodity is?
Here is his definition: "If a pound of opium, a box of dum-dum bullets
or a portrait of Hitler find customers on the market, the labor which has
been spent on their output is socially necessary labor" (p. 43-44). Nothing
could possibly he a more total absolute opposite of what Marx analyzed
in socially necessary labor time which, in the case of capitalism, is "dead
labor dominating living labor" and, in the case of socialism, is the
"place for human self-development."
Mandel is oblivious to all this. Instead, he writes of "Marx's key
discovery: theory of surplus value," as if that too involved mostly market,
sales, money - the whole distributive sphere which Marx held would
blind us not only to the primacy of relations of production, but make us,
indeed, fall victim to the fetishism of commodities, which freely - and
only freely -- associated men can possibly strip off.
Marx, however, was so determined to stress the freedom that he
warned the Paris Communards that unless control is totally in their own
hands, even cooperative labor can become a "sham and a snare." He
returned to the subject in Vol. II of Capital:

22 "The historical principle" is exactly what the Russians used as the reason
for cutting out Chapter 1 of Capital. As I wrote in my commentary then (1944):
The ideas and methodology of the article are not accidental. They are the
methodology of an "intelligentsia" concerned with the acquisition of "surplus
products." What is important is that this departure from "past teaching of political
economy" actually mirrors economic reality. The Soviet Union has entered the .
period of "applied economics." Instead of theory, the article presents an admin-
istrative formula for minimum costs and maximum production. It is the constitution
of Russia's post-war economy.
21
 ". . . we must not follow the manner copied by Proudhon from
bourgeois economics, which looks upon this matter as though
a society with a capitalist mode of production would lose its
specific historical and economic characteristics by being taken
as a unit. Not at all. We have in that case to deal with the
aggregate capitalist."23

T ODAY'S GLOBAL CRISES elicited from Mandel what is not ob-

vious in his Introduction to Marx's Capital, but in fact underlies
his total misconception, and that is the concept of an existing equilibrium
- and in our crisis-ridden age, at that. Thus, as he got to the "Deeper
Causes" in his analysis of "A Hesitant, Uneven, Inflationary Upturn," he
cited what in fact characterizes all his books and articles, and that is
Kondratiev's "long wave theory."
The fact that the editor - New Left Review - of this new edition
of Marx's Capital can, in two succeeding issues of New Left Review, both
praise Mandel's Late Capitalism and also catch the revisionism24 both of
Marxism and Trotskyism inherent in Mandel's adherence to Kondratiev's
"long wave theory," shows the confusion prevalent in all modern-day
Marxist theoreticians who try to keep away from the theory of state-
capitalism, leaving all their "newness" contained in the time-abstraction
of "Late Capitalism" - not to mention academicians a la Daniel Bell
who call it "post-industrial." As if the transformation into opposite of
Lenin's into Stalin's Russia were a mere passing "historical detour," from
which "dark interlude" it "slowly began to emerge in the 1950s" (p. 85),
Mandel shows further how very "au courant" he really is by referring
not only to James Burnham's Managerial Revolution of the early 1940s
but also Galbraith's "technostructure" New Industrial State of the
1960s (p. 81), not to mention Paul Samuelson's concept of "mixed
economy" - every thesis except the real issue which tore Trotskyism
apart before World War II, and wreaked havoc within Stalinism in
the post-World War II period and is continuing to this day in Eastern
Europe.
What did split Trotskyism and what is at issue at this very moment,
whether we look at the global crisis of "the West" or the whole world
and its "restructuring,'' especially the North-South dialogue, is the question
of the class nature of Russia.25 To treat the question seriously, we must

23 Capital, Vol. II, p. 503.

24 New Left Review, #99, Sept.-Oct. 1976, "The TheO'ry of Long Waves: Kon-
dratiev, Trotsky, Mandel," by Richard B. Day: "No amount of subtlety can over-
come the basic fact that, in Trotsky's view, long-waves - or long cycles - were
incompatible with a Marxist periodization of the history of capitalism."
25 It isn't that Mandel doesn't know of the class nature of Russia that was
designated as state-capitalism. Ernest Mandel happened to have been the person
who debated me in 1947 when I presented the theory of state-capitalism, which I
22
neither stop at journalistic phrases, nor at Mao's late discovery after he
broke with "deStalinized" Russia and first then began to designate
Russia as "state-capitalist." No, we must begin at the beginning, when
Marx first projected, in the crucial, famous, irreversible French edition,
1872-75, the idea that the law of concentration and centralization of
capital would reach its ultimate when "the entire social capital was
united in the hands of either a single capitalist or a single capitalist
company" (p. 779).
Now, though Mandel does even less about this addition to Capital
than he did with fetishism, which he mentioned in a single phrase, the
fact is that this is not all Marx said of the ultimate development of
concentration and centralization of capital. Nor is it only that his closest
collaborator, Frederick Engels, who edited Vols. II and III of Capital,
added some statements about Marx's prediction of monopoly. The addi-
tions to the 1872-75 French publication were, in turn, followed by
Anti-Diihring upon which Marx collaborated with Engels. It reads:
"The more productive forces it (the state) takes over, the more
it becomes the collective body of capitalists, the more citizens it
exploits . . . State ownership of the productive forces is not the
solution of the conflict . . ."
Far from "ownership" alone determining the class relationship,
Marx, from his first break with bourgeois society in 1843, through his
leadership in the Workingmen's (First) International Association in
1864, to his death in 1883, never varied from "dead labor dominating
living labor" as the determinant of capitalism.
As always, however, it is only when a concrete objective crisis
makes philosophy a matter of concrete urgency for revolutionaries, that
theory becomes "practical." It was not only when the Second International
collapsed along with private, competitive capitalism, that Lenin saw the
dialectical transformation into opposite, the counter-revolution within
revolution. He saw it in the workers' state itself. He worried about its
revolutionary leadership - its main "theoretician," Bukharin, and his
mechanical materialism. Lenin suddenly feared that his co-leader was
not "fully a Marxist" since he "did not fully understand the dialectic."
It wasn't a question of the word, "state.capitalism." Bukharin had
used the expression "state-capitalism." So did Leon Trotsky who, in 1919,

was the first to work out from original Russian sources on the basis of the first
three Five Year Plans, when the Russians were still denying the operation of the
law of value in their "socialist land." (See "Analysis of the Russian Economy,"
New International, December, 1942, January, 1943, February, 1943; and again in
December, 1946 and January, 1947. After World War II, I analyzed the fourth
Five Year Plan, "New Developments in Stalin's Russia," in Labor Action, October,
1946.) Following that conference of the Fourth International, the French Trotskyist
theoretical journal, of which Mandel was an editor, published my article on the
Varga controversy (see Quatrieme Internationale, Jan.-Feb. 1948.)
23
in the First Manifesto of the Third International, wrote:
"The state control of social life for which capitalism so strived,
is become reality. There is no turning back either to free com-
petition or to the domination of trusts . . . The question consists
solely in this: who shall control state production in the future -
the imperialist state, or the state of the victorious proletariat?"

Now it is true that Trotsky recognized this only theoretically, and,

in fact, did not accept state-capitalism as the designation for Stalinist
Russia, though he fought Stalinism and held that "The Revolution [Was]
Betrayed." It is not true that Lenin didn't see both state-capitalism and
its absolute opposite - the revolutionary, self-determining subject, the
proletariat that was the whole, without which there was no new society.
Which is why his Will was almost as adamant against the "administra·
tive mentality" (Trotsky and Bukharin) as against the one whose removal
he demanded - Stalin.
In any case, once World War II ended, and capitalism had also
learned "to plan" and "to nationalize," Varga saw no signs of a general
economic crisis coming any earlier than a decade hence, whereupon
Stalin had the whole Institute of World Economics turn against him.
Varga was made to repudiate his written view of the post-war economy
as any new stage of world economy. Maria. Natovna-Smit was left stand-
ing alone, defending the position that the stage of world economy was
"state-capitalism" and quoting Lenin, who had seen its element in World
War I:
"During the war, world capitalism took a step forward not only
toward concentration in general, but also toward state-capitalism
in even a greater degree than formerly."26
Just as Stalin buried Lenin's first grappling with elements of state-
capitalism, so the Trotskyist epigones evaded the whole theoretical ques-
tion of state-capitalism in Russia, which had led to such deep splits in
the Fourth International, that Mandel now (and not only in his journal-
istic writings but in his new book Late Capitalism) has "rehabilitated"
Kondratiev and his long-term equilibrium analysis!

In Stalinist Russia, with its Draconian laws against labor, and de-
humanized forced-labor camps, the 1943 revision in the law of value was
followed by Zhdanov's 1947 revision in philosophy, which invented
nothing short of "a new dialectical law" - "Criticism and Self-Criticism"
- in place of the objectivity of the contradiction of class struggle and
"negation of negation," that is to say, proletarian revolution. De-Stalin-

26 Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. XXX, p. 300 (Russian edition). The Steno·
graphic Report of that debate was published in English by Public Affairs Press,
Washington, D.C., 1948.
24
ized Russia did nothing to change this wholesale revision of Marx's
Historical-Dialectical Materialism.
Mandel's bringing in "history" now is indistinguishable from Stalin-
ism's claim that the commodity-form and law of value have existed before
capitalism and after, and are not "only" capitalistic. It is sad, indeed, to
have to record also that Trotskyism, despite the fact that Trotsky had
always fought Stalinism, thus not besmirching any concept of socialism,
nowadays keeps its political battles so far afield from its economics
and philosophy that its major leader, Mandel, can actually hail Russian
post-war revisions as a "true rebirth" of Marxism.
The result is a violation of both Marxian theory and practice, not
only "in general," but as it affects the view of the present global crises,
not just on the question of analysis of any set of crises. The question
goes far beyond any "rejiggering of the world's economic balance
sheet" by playing around with the latest bag of tricks on bourgeois and
developing countries, such as "indexing" the prices of raw materials.
The point is that, even if one didn't wish to accept our analysis of
state-capitalism as the total contradiction, absolute antagonism in which
is concentrated nothing short of revolution, and counter-revolution, one
would have to admit that the totality of the contradictions compels a
total philosophic outlook. Today's dialectics is not just philosophy, but
dialectics of liberation, of self-emancipation by all forces of revolution -
proletariat, Black, women, youth. The beginning and end of all revolves
around labor. Therein is the genius of Marx, who, though he wrote
during a "free enterprise, private property, competitive capitalistic era,"
saw that, instead of plan vs. market chaos being the absolute opposites,
the chaos in the market was, in fact, the expression of the hierarchic,
despotic plan of capital at the point of production. "Materialism" without
dialectics is "idealism," bourgeois idealism of the state-capitalist age.
As I pointed out in my critique of Mandel's Marxist Economic Theory:
No wonder that the bourgeois reviewers were so pleased with
Mandel's \'iew of the market mechanisms acting as "stabilizers."
Mandel wanted to synthesize the overproduction, underconsumption
disproportionality theories of crises with Marx's, which is related
strictly to the law of value and surplus value. But as Marx said of
Proudhon, "He wishes to be a synthesis, he is a composite
error."27
September 21, 1977
Detroit, Michigan

27 Poverty of Philosophy, p. 228.

25
 CHAPTER FIVE

THE IMPACT OF THE CIVIL WAR IN

THE UNITED STATES ON THE
STRUCTURE OF CAPITAL

The decade of the 1860's was decisive for the l!tructure of

Marx's greatest theoretical work, CAPITAL. No one is more
blind to the greatness of Marx's contributions than those who praise
him to the skies for his genius as if that genius matured outside
of the actual struggles of the historic period in which he lived.
As if he gained the impulses from the sheer development of his
own thoughts instead of from living workers changing living real-
ity by their actions. We shall see in a moment that Marx's Critique
of Political Economy is proof of the limitations of a theoretical
work when the workers themselves are not in motion. CAPITAL,
on the other hand, is proof of the creative impact of masses in
motion on theory. The historic circumstances in which this great-
est theoretical work of Marxism takes final shape were not simply
"background" for a genius who coincidentally "happened" to com-
plete his theoretical studies of more than two decades. A glance at
the objective events that made him, as he put it, "tum everything
around," will show us how he reconstructed his own work.

1) The Abolitionists, the Civil War, and the First International

On January 11, 1860, Marx wrote to Engels: '''In my opinion,
the biggest things that are happening in the world today are on
the one hand the movement of the slaves in America started by
the death of John Brown and, on the other, the movement of the

26
 MARXISM AND FREEDOM

serfs in Russia. . . . I have just seen in the Tribune that there

has been a fresh rising of slaves in Missouri, naturally suppressed.
But the signal has now been given."
From now on he will not only keep his eyes glued to the
mass movement; he will participate in it. The decade of the Civil
War in the United States is also the decade of the Polish Insur-
rection, the strikes in France, and the mass demonstrations in
England which culminate in the creation of the International
Working Men's Association headed by Marx.
The Civil War was the first modern war of mass armies and
total involvement. 4 8 It lasted four years and cost the lives of a
million men. The cost in lives was so frightful and the duration
so long because Lincoln sought to confine the conflict as a white
man's war. Though slavery was the root, and the creative ener-
gies of the runaway slaves the vital force, Lincoln's main strate-
gic concern was to conciliate the so-called "moderate" border slave
states which remained in the Union. Consequently, he wanted
neither to free the slaves nor to allow them to participate in the
war as soldiers. As Marx put it in letters to Engels: "All Lincoln's
acts appear like the mean pettifogging conditions which one lawyer
puts to his opposing lawyer. But this does not alter their historic
content. . . . The events over there are a world upheaval. . . ."
Even from the narrowest military point of view, Marx knew
that Lincoln would have to move towards emancipation of the
slaves. "I do not think that all is up. . . ." he wrote Engels. "A
single Negro regiment would have a remarkable effect on Southern
nerves. . . . A war of this kind must he conducted on revolu-
tionary lines while the Yankees have thus far been trying to con-
duct it constitutionally." Long before sheer military necessity
forced Lincoln to bow to the inevitable and issue the Emancipa-
tion Proclamation, Marx recorded the views of the Abolitionists. 49
In one of his columns for the Vienna Presse, at the very time
that both the American and English press were attacking Wendell
Phillips he summarized a speech by him. This is the introduction
Marx gave his summary: "Together with Garrison and G. Smith,
Wendell Phillips is the leader of the Abolitionists in New England.
For thirty years he has without intermission and at the risk of his
life proclaimed the emancipation of the slaves as his battle-cry,
27
IMPACT OF CIVIL WAR IN U.S. ON STRUCTURE OF CAPITAL

regardless alike of the persiflage of the press, the enraged howls

Qf paid rowdies and the conciliatory representations of solicitous
friends . . . . In the present state of affairs Wendell Phillips'
speech is of greater importance than a battle bulletin."
The movement of the runaway slaves, 50 who followed the
North Star to freedom, brought on the Civil War. But Lincoln's
generals fought to maintain slavery and therefore they fought
in vain. "I do not say," Marx quoted Wendell Phillips, "that
McClellan is a traitor; but I say that if he were a traitor, he must
have acted exactly as he has done. . .. The President has not
put the Confiscation Act into operation. He may be honest, but
what has his honesty to do with the matter? He has neither insight
nor foresight. . . . I know Lincoln. I have taken his measure
in Washington. He is a first-rate second-rate man."111
Marx was watching the impact which the Civil War was
having upon the European working class. As the foreign
correspondent for the newspapers he represented-the New York
Tribune and Die Vienna Presse-Marx reported the mammoth
meeting of the English workers which prevented the govern-
ment's intervention on the side of the South. It was under the
impact of the Civil War and the response of the European workers
as well as the Polish insurrection, that the International Working
Men's Association, known as the First International, was born.
In the name of the International Marx wrote to Lincoln: "From
the commencement of the titanic American strife the workingmen
of Europe felt instinctively that the star-spangled banner carried
the destiny of their class. . . . Everywhere they bore therefore
patiently the hardships imposed upon them by the cotton crisis,
opposed enthusiastically the pro-slavery intervention, importunities
of their 'betters,' and from most parts of Europe contributed
their quota of blood to the good cause.
"While the workingmen, the true political power of the North,
allowed slavery to defile their own republic; while before the
Negro, mastered and sold without his concurrence, they boasted
it the highest prerogative of the white-skinned laborer to sell
himself and choose his own master; they were unable to attain
the true freedom of labor or to support their European brethren

28
 l\IARXIS:\l Al'<D FREEDOM

in their struggle for emancipation, but this barrier to progress

has been swept off by the red sea of civil war." 5 2
We can see from the very contents of CAPITAL that this was
by no means sheer '''diplomacy." Marx separated himself from the
self-styled American Marxists who evaded the whole issue of the
Civil War by saying they were opposed to "all slavery, wage and
chattel." 53 His analysis of the struggle for the shortening of the
working day comes to a climax, as we shall see later, when he
writes of the relationship of the end of slavery to the struggle for
the eight hour day: "In the United States of North America, every
independent movement of the workers was paralyzed so long as
slavery disfigured a part of the Republic. Labor cannot emancipate
itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded. But out
of the death of slavery a new life at once arose. The first fruit of
the Civil War was the eight hours' agitation, that ran with the
seven-leagued boots of the locomotive from the Atlantic to the
Pacific, from New England to California. The General Congress
of Labor at Baltimore (August 16, 1866) declared: 'The first
and great necessity of the present, to free the labor of this coun-
try from capitalistic slavery, is the passing of a law by which eight
hours shall be the normal working-day in all States of the American
Union. We are resolved to put forth all our strength until this
glorious result is attained.' "54
The impact of the Civil War on the European revolution
(the Paris Commune) is stated mccinctly enough right at the start
of CAPITAL. Its preface states: "As in the eighteenth century
the American war of independence sounded the tocsin for the
European middle-class, so in the nineteenth century the American
Civil War sounded it for the European working class." \\Te now
turn to the impact it had on the structure of CAPITAL.

2) The Relationship of History to Theory

In contrast to the actions of the European masses, the arro-
gant insensitivity of European intellectuals to the Civil War in
the United States is best exemplified by Lassalle. Where Marx
turned his attention to the world-shaking event, Lassalle dismissed
it. In a letter to Engels, dated July 30, 1862, Marx reports La-
29
IMPACT OF CIVIL WAR IN U.S. ON STRUCTURE OF CAPITAL

salle's views: "The Yankees have no 'ideas.' 'Individual liberty'

is merely a 'negative idea,' etc., and more of this old, decayed,
speculative rubbish."55
Under the impact of the Civil War, Marx, on the other hand,
gave an entirely new structure to his theoretical work. He had
long since dismissed Lassalle's pretense of being a dialectician:
"He will learn to his cost," Marx wrote on February l, 1858,
"that to bring a science by criticism to the point where it can be
dialectically presented is an altogether different thing from apply-
ing an abstract ready-made system of logic to mere inklings of
such a system." The result of Marx's own study, at that time, was
called A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy." 6

a) Critique of Political Economy: The Limits of an Intellectual

Work
Marx begins with that everyday thing, the commodity, and
immediately points to the duality of this thing which is a use-
value and an exchange-value all at once. Hence, it is not just a
thing, not just a utility, but a value. It could not have this
two-fold nature as a product of labor if the labor itself did not have
that character. The commodity in embryo contains all the con-
tradictions of capitalism precisely because of the contradictory
nature of labor. That is the key to all contradiction. That, Marx
will point out again in CAPITAL, is his original contribution
to political economy. Without that, it is impossible to compre-
hend political economy.
Exchange value, Marx continues, only appears to be a quan-
titative relation, that is, a given proportion of time embodied in
wheat being exchanged for a given proportion of time embodied
in linen. But the question is: what kind of labor creates value? It
cannot be concrete labor: "Tailoring, e.g., in its material manifes-
tation as a distinct productive activity produces a coat, but not
the exchange value of a coat. The latter is produced not by the
labor of the tailor as such but by abstract universal labor that
belongs to a certain organization of society which has not been
brought about by the tailor."57
30
 MARXISM AND FREEDOM

This organization of society, which has not been brought

about by the tailor, is the capitalistic organization where all labor,
no matter what its concrete nature, is timed according to what is
socially necessary. It becomes one mass of abstract labor precisely
because the laborer himself is paid at value, that is, the necessi-
ties of life needed to sustain him. "Thus relative value measured
by labor time is fatally the formula of modern slavery of the
worker instead of being, as M. Proudhon would have it, the revolu-
tionary formula of the emancipation of the proletariat."
The very duality of the labor, the very duality within the
commodity, is what has made it necessary for one single commodity,
money, to act as the value measure of the commodity. For his
commodity, the capitalist wants to buy not another use-value, but
money, which buys .. all things." The division of commodities and
money makes that possible. Money, like any other commodity,
is equal to the labor time that it took to produce, to mine it and
mint it; but unlike any other commodity, it is universally recog-
nized to be just that and hence acts as a "natural" measure. But
that measure is natural to it only because it is the recognized rep-
resentative of labor in its abstract form. In other words, like
labor, it is not a thing, but a social relationship.
The very fact that Proudhon wants it to be "no more than"
a circulating medium, which is precisely its function, shows that
even he recognizes that it hides an exploitative production relation-
ship. Only he thinks not to break up that production relationship
which is the cause of it, but only to alter its appearance in money.
Under capitalism, money can no more be made available to every-
one than classes can be abolished by fiat-from Proudhon or from
the government.
In this work, Marx limits himself to the question of exchange.
He does no more than point to the fact that behind the exchange of
things there is a relationship of production. Only comparatively
recently, (1939), have we seen the publication of his immense
intellectual labors and writings for the year 1857-1858.11 8 They
show a tremendous dialectical and original economic development.
Marx himself allowed only the first chapters to be published
as the Critique. In the preface to that he states why he omits
"a general introduction which I had prepared as on second thought
31
IMPACT OF CIVIL WAR IN U.S. ON STRUCTURE OF CAPITAL

any anticipation of results that are still to be proven seemed to be

objectionable, and the reader who wishes to follow me at all must
make up his mind to pass from the special to the general." The
truth is that the work, both in its special and in its general aspects,
lacks a structure, a shape that can come only out of the developing
class itself. That is why Marx started "all over" in CAPITAL.
It is not that labor had not been central to Marx. But in the
period of the 1850's, following the defeat of the 1848 Revolutions,
the workers were quiescent. What happens to a theoretician, to
any theoretician, even to a Marx, when the proletarian revolutions
are crushed, is that he must watch the laws of economic develop·
ment of the old social order without being able to see the specific
form of revolt with which the workers mean to meet the new
stage of production.
The Critique turned out to be an intellectual, that is, a remote
work; a theoretical answer to an actual problem. Or, to put it
differently, it was an application of dialectics to political economy,
instead of the creation of the dialectic that would arise out of the
workers' struggles themselves.
Marx had no sooner finished the work than he became dis-
satisfied with it. Although his Critique was by no means mere
"inklings of a system" but the whole of classical political economy
subjected to a profound criticism, Marx decided not to continue
with it. The great historic events of the 1860's wrought basic changes
in society, in politics, in thinking. As the proletariat began to move
positively towards its own emancipation, they illuminated all the
studies Marx had undertaken in the previous period, and gave
new insights into the development of capitalist production.

b) The Working Day and the Break with the Concept of Theory
Between 1861 and 1867 the manuscript of the Critique, now
become CAPITAL, underwent two fundamental changes, one in
1863, and the other in 1866. We can trace the changes both by
comparing CAPITAL to the state the manuscripts were left in,
which Engels describes in the Preface to Volume II of CAPITAL,
as well as from Marx's own letters. As he puts it in the letter to
32
 MARXISM AND FREEDOM

Engels on August 15, 1863, he has had "to turn everything around":
" . . . when I look at this compilation (the manuscripts of the
Critique, which he is now re-working under the title of CAPITAL)
and see how I have had to turn everything around and how I had
to make even the historical part out of material of which some
was quite unknown, then he (Lassalle) does seem funny with 'his'
economy already in his pocket. . .. " By the time, three years
later, that he has finally prepared everything for the printer, he
informs Engels about yet a new addition: "Historically I developed
a part about the working day which did not enter into my first
plan." (February 10, 1866)
It sounds fantastic to say that until 1866 Marx had not
worked out the seventy pages on the Working Day. Yet so inherent
in theory itself is its own limitation that even when Marx turned
the monographs for the Critique entirely around, and wrote the
first draft of his new work, CAPITAL, even this work at first
had no section on the Working Day. That Ricardo didn't con-
cern himself with the working day is understandable because
he evaded the whole problem of the origin of.surplus value. That
socialists, from the utopians through Proudhon to Lassalle, were
not weighted down by this problem is explained easily enough
since they were too busy with their plans ever to study the real
workers' movement. But for Marx, who had never once taken
his eyes off the proletarian movement, not to have had a section
on the Working Day in his major theoretical work seems incom-
prehensible.
It seems even more incomprehensible when we realize that
Marx had already written the "Primitive Accumulation" of CAP-
ITAL, which describes the "Bloody Legislation against the Ex-
propriated," in which he dealt with laws that made the lengthen-
ing of the working day compulsory. The concept of the theory of
surplus value includes the division of the working day into paid
and unpaid labor. But that still leaves the exact analysis of the
working day, for the most part, undetermined. As he was to put it
later about his adversary, Dilhring: "One thing in his account
has struck me very much. Namely, so long as the determination of
value by working time is itself left 'undetermined,' as it is by
Ricardo, it does not make people shaky. But as soon as it is brought
33
IMPACT OF CIVIL WAR IN U.S. ON STRUCTURE OF CAPITAL

into exact connection with the working day and its variations, a
very unpleasant light dawns upon them." 5 9
"The establishment of a normal working day," he wrote, "is
the result of centuries of struggle between capitalist and laborer."Go
Marx's method of analysis was revolutionized thereby. Where, in
his Critique, history and theory are separated, with a historical
explanation attached to each theoretical chapter; in CAP IT AL,
history and theory are inseparable. Where, in Critique, history is
the history of theory; in CAPITAL, history is the history of the
class struggle.
He who glorifies theory and genius but fails to recognize
the limits of a theoretical work, fails likewise to recognize the
indispensability of the theoretician. All of history is the history
of the struggle for freedom. If, as a theoretician, one's ears are at-
tuned to the new impulses from the workers, new "categories" will
be created, a new way of thinking, a step forward in philosophic
cognition.
Marx's shift from the history of theory to the history of pro-
duction relations gives flesh and blood to the generalization that
Marxism is the theoretical expression of the instinctive strivings of
the proletariat for liberation. More than that. He says that ulti-
mately the fundamental abolition of inequality lies in the shorten-
ing of the working day. In 1866, he made this the historical frame-
work of capitalism itself. The struggles of the workers over the
working day develop capitalist production. The ultimate creation
of freedom rests upon the shortening of the working day. The
philosophy of the shortening of the working day, which arose out
of the actual struggles, embraces all concepts inside and outside of
it. Thus, the thinking of the theoretician is constantly filled with
more and more content, filled by workers' struggles and workers'
thoughts.
Beginning in 1866, Marx had been developing the section on
the Working Day. By the time CAPITAL is published in 1867, we
read this tribute to the workers' own thinking: "In place of the
pompous catalogue of the 'inalienable rights of man' comes the
modest Magna Charta of a legally limited working day which
shall make clear when the time which the worker sells is ended,
and when his own begins. Quantum mutatus ab illo."61
34
 MARXISM AND FREEDOM

The real movement of the proletariat, at this specific stage

of capitalist development, revealed not only the negative aspects
in the fight for the working day-the struggle against unlimited
capitalist exploitation-but the positive aspects-a road to free-
dom. This then, was a new philosophy, the philosophy of labor,
arrived at naturally out of its own concrete struggles. We see why
Marx had "to turn everything around." Now let us look at how
he did it. Engels tells us the original manuscripts consisted of 1472
pages, as follows:s2
(1) Pages one to 220 and again pages 1159 to 1472 are the
first draft of Volume I, beginning with transformation of money
into capital and continuing to the end of the volume. Note that
this does not account for pages 220 to 1159. The skipped pages
turn out to have dealt with the question of the history of theory
and the decline in the rate of profit, thus:
(2) Pages 978 to ll58 comprise the first draft of the subject
material of capital, profit and rate of profit. Ultimately that
formed the subject matter of Volume III. Originally, however, he
intended to include, as part of Volume I, the subject matter dealt
with on these pages. This type of procedure was later castigated
by Marx: "We shall show in Book III that the rate of profit is no
mystery so soon as we know the laws of surplus value. If we reverse
the process we cannot comprehend either the one or the other.'' 6 8
(3) Now then, pages 220 to 972 constitute what Marx later
considered to be Book IV of CAPITAL, and entitled "History of
Theory."H In this first draft, however, these 750 pages would have
followed directly after the buying and selling of labor power. A
look at the published Critique will reveal what this first plan
meant in the actual structure. After each chapter of the Critique
-Commodities; Money-there follows an excursus on the history
of the theory of the same subject, somewhat on the order of Hegel's
"'Observations" in the Logic. Marx meant to follow that same
procedure for the rest of the work. That is to say, as soon as
he would state his theory on any subject he would have followed it
up with arguments against other theorists. Somewhere he says that
this is the natural procedure as one works something out for him-
self. It is an ordinary procedure for an intellectual to study the
history of other theories and to separate himself from them on
35
IMPACT OF CIVIL WAR IN U.S. ON STRUCTURE OF CAPITAL

their ground. It is the method which Marx discarded when he

decided "to turn everything around."
Once he decides to do this, he separates the material dealing
with the phenomena of profit and rate of profit, or "forms of the
process of production as a whole," from the process of production
itself. At the same time, he takes out the voluminous material on
the "History of Theory," and relegates it to the very end of all
three volumes, as Book IV. He is breaking with the whole con·
cept of theory as something intellectual, a dispute between the-
oreticians.
Instead of keeping up a running argument with theorists, he
goes directly into the labor process itself, and thence to theWork-
ing Day. He no sooner relegated the history of theory to the end
of the whole work, and began to look at the history of production
relations, than he of necessity created a new dialectic instead of
applying one. Or, more precisely, a new dialectic flowed out of
the labor process. This new dialectic led him to meet, theoretically,
the workers' resistance inside the factory and outside of it. The re-
. suit is the new section in CAPITAL, "The, Working Day."
Marx, the theoretician, created new categories out of the
impulses from the workers. It wasn't he, however, who decided
that the Civil War in the United States was a holy war of labor.
It was the working class of England, the very ones who suffered
most, who decided that.
From start to finish, Marx is concerned with the revolu-
tionary actions of the proletariat. The concept of theory now is
something unified with action. Or, more correctly, theory is not
something the intellectual works out alone. Rather, the actions of
the proletariat create the possibility for the intellectual to work
out theory. Here then, we have the really fundamental break with
Hegel. It is in this that CAPITAL is distinguished from the Logic
and yet contains it, for CAPITAL is the dialectic of bourgeois so-
ciety, its development and downfall. As Lenin was to put it in 1915:
"If Marx did not leave a Logic (with a capital letter), he left the
logic of CAPITAL. . . . In CAPITAL the logic, dialectic and
theory of knowledge of materialism (three words are not necessary:
they are one and the same) are applied to one science, taking all
of value in Hegel and moving this value forward."65
36
 CHAPTER SIX

THE PARIS COMMUNE ILLUMINATES AND

DEEPENS THE CONTENT OF CAPITAL

1) The Despotic Plan of Capital vs. the Cooperation of Freely

Associated Labor
Marx had begun his analysis of capitalism some three decades
before the establishment of the Paris commune in 1871. Labor
was the pivot of his theory from the start. It was the concept of
alienated labor that enabled him to dig deep into the inner
mechanism of capitalist production. The first edition of CAPITAL,
published in 1867, disclosed that what appeared, ideally, as plan,
revealed itself, in reality, in the labor process, to be but the
undisputed authority of the capitalist. For Marx, the theoretical
axis of CAPITAL-the central core around which all else develops
-is the question of plan: the despotic plan of capital against the
cooperative plan of freely associated labor.
The despotic plan inherent in capitalist production reveals
itself in a form all its own-the hierarchic structure of control over
social labor. To keep production going on an ever-expanding scale,
to extract the greatest amount of surplus or unpaid labor, requires
a whole army of foremen, managers, superintendents. These all
work for the capitalist with one aim and purpose: to force labor
out of the many laborers. The attempt to control cooperative
labor within capitalist confines must of necessity assume a despotic
form. Planned despotism arises out of the antagonistic relationship
between the workers, on the one hand, and the capitalist and his
bureaucracy on the other hand.
Cooperation under the mastership of the capitalist is in direct
opposition to the cooperating laborers. The worker had lost his

37
THE PARIS COMMUNE

individual skill to the machine. But he gained a new power in

cooperating with his fellow workers. From the start this is a mass
power. The opposition is between the nature of the cooperative
form of labor and the capitalistic form of value production.
Cooperation is in itself a productive power, the power of so-
cial labor. Under capitalistic control, this cooperative labor is not
allowed to develop freely. Its function is confined to the produc-
tion of value. It cannot release its new, social, human energies so
long as the old mode of production continues. Thus the nature
of the cooperative form of labor power is in opposition to the
capitalist integument, the value-form. At the same time the mon-
strous creation of monotony, speed-up, uniformity, military regu-
larity and more speed-up robs science also of its self-development,
confining it to the single purpose of extracting ever greater amounts
of surplus, unpaid labor from the workers.
This develops into the absolute contradiction between the
nature of machine industry and the value-form of its operation.
Technological writing had analyzed the few main fundamental
motions. There it stopped. It could go no further because there
is no such thing as an abstract, remote, classless development of
machinery. Technology is an integral part of the development of
the productive forces. To exclude from it the greatest productive
force-living labor-cripples and emasculates science itself. Under
capitalism, the separation of the intellectual powers of produc-
tion from manual labor, the incorporation of all science into the
machine, means the transformation of intellectual power into the
might of capital over labor, the engineer and technician against
the worker. In a word, it means the transformation of man into a
mere fragment of a man, just when the narrow technical needs
of the machine itself demand variation in labor, fluidity, and
mobility-all rounded, fully developed human beings using all of
their human talents, both natural and acquired.
This is what Marx announced ·to the whole world in 1867.
Before this theoretic onslaught, so total as to include both history
and the actuality of the class struggle, bourgeois economics lay
prostrate. Whereas nearly fifty years earlier, in 1821, Ricardo had
at least posed the contradiction in machine production, vulgar
economy was now, in 1867, reduced to denying this contradiction
38
 MARXISM AND FREEDOM

altogether. The emptiness of bourgeois economic thinking can be

seen in their argument: since the contradiction is not iqherent in
machinery "as such," it is a delusion to think that there are con-
tradictions in machinery under capitalist control. This adding of
two and two and coming up with zero did not stop the bourgeois
economist, however, from declaiming against the "backwardness"
and stupidity of the worker who broke up the machinery. Tl.le
capitalist ideologist tries to argue away the workers' enslavement
to capital at the same time that society itself is threatened with
the destruction of its human resources.
If the workers are too absorbed in their concrete struggles
to indulge in abstract arguments about machinery "as such," the
very struggles nevertheless reveal them to be full of new percep-
tions. True, they fought the machine itself as a competitor. But
the first appearance of machinery as a handmaiden of capital was
its true appearance. Theirinstinct was right while the economist's
thinking was abstract. There is no such thing as machinery "as
such." The worker could not possibly regard the machine '''as such"
-as standing above and apart from the capitalistic mode of pro-
duction under which the machine was developed to extract rela-
tively greater amounts of unpaid labor from the workers. In the
further struggles against capital, the worker learned to fight not
the instrument of labor, but the capitalistic employment of it-
the conditions of production which transformed him into a mere
cog in the machine.
Due to the cooperative form of the labor process the resistance
of the workers is also a mass power. The workers' revolt develops
from their fight against the instruments of labor into their strug-
gle against the capitalistic conditions of labor. The workers thus
at one and same time fight for their emancipation and against the
capitalistic limitations of science and technology. The depth and
breadth of the class struggles are a sign that the contradictions of
capitalistic production are driving toward a new resolution. The
resolution toward which the Paris Commune drove shed such
strong illumination on the fetishism of commodities and the law
of motion of capitalism that it deepened the very content of
CAPITAL.

39
THE PAllIS COMMUNE
2) The Paris Commune-a Form of Workers' Rule
The social revolution that erupted in Paris on March 18,
1871 was not like anything ever before seen in history. The treason
of the ruling class necessitated the saving of French civilization
by the proletariat. A few months earlier, Napoleon III had suf-
fered defeat in the Franco-Prussian war. The bourgeois republic
which took over the reins of government was more afraid of
revolutionary Paris than of Bismarck's army. With the flight of this
government to Versailles, the revolutionary proletariat reached the
greatest turning point in history-the remolding of itself as the
ruling class.
Louis Blanqui, famous revolutionary and head of a secret
armed force, had been plotting insurrection, seriously and unre-
mittingly, for years. He tried again when the Republic of France
showed itself ready to sell out to Bismarck. Without mass sup-
port, the insurrectionary plan of his elite group failed of necessity.
In real life, the insurrection came at the peak of ascending revolu-
tion, not vice versa, and not as a plot.
On March 18th, the soldiers were ordered by M. Thiers, the
head of the reactionary government, to transport the cannon
of Paris to Versailles. The milkmaids, who were on the streets
before dawn, saw what was afoot and thwarted the treacherous
plans of the reactionary government. They surrounded the soldiers
and prevented them from carrying out Thiers' orders. Although
the men had not yet come into the streets on this early morning,
and although the women were not armed, they held their own.
As in every real peoples' revolution, new strata of the population
were awakened. This time it was the women* who were to act
first. When reveille was sounded, all of Paris was in the streets.
Thiers' spies barely escaped with the information that it was im-
possible to inform on who the leaders of the uprising were, since
the entire population was involved.
This act of self-defense by the Parisian masses was also the
act of self-government. Just as the Second Empire was the natural
offspring of the parliamentary government which had crushed
the 1848 Revolution, so the parliamentary government that had
* Sin<'e the publication of Marxism and Freedom in 1958, a beautiful work on the
activities of women in the Paris Commune, which al'o take~ up their relationship
to Marx, has been published. See The Women Incendiaries by Edith Thomas
(Secker & Warhuqi;, London, 1967; George Braziller, NY, 1966 l.

40
 MARXISM AND FREEDOM

succeeded Napoleon III had but one function-to be the engine

of class despotism.
The first act of the Revolution was to arm itself. The armed
people struck out against the everywhere present state organs
-the army, the police, officialdom-which were such a faithful
copy of the hierarchic division of labor in the factory. The fir~t
workers' state in history, called the Commune of Paris, was born.
The Commune was composed, in the main, of Blanquists and
Proudhonists. But the Blanquists became Communards only by
giving up their insurrectionary plan and riding on the wave of the
peoples' revolution. The Proudhonists likewise had to give up
their utopian schemes. The development of large-scale production
had already undermined the artisan type who formed the social
base for Proudhonism. Now, the 1871 Revolution destroyed en-
tirely the Proudhonist philosophy of "no political activity." The
Parisian workers, who had just overthrown bourgeois domination,
got down to the task of ruling themselves and setting down the
conditions of their labor. All this was being done while the enemy
was at the gates.
The first decree of the first workers' state was the abolition
of the standing army. The first announcement of the type of politi-
cal rule to be set up is typical: "AU public services are reorganized
and simplified."
The armed people smashed parliamentarianism. The people's
assembly was not to be a parliamentary talking-shop but a working
body. Those who passed the laws were also to execute them. There
was thus to be no division between the executive and legislative
bodies. The sham independence of the judiciary was similarly
eliminated. Judges, as all other representatives, were to be elected
and subject to recall. Representatives of the proletariat, however,
were not yet the proletariat as a whole. Therefore, to assure con-
trol over the elected representatives, they too were subject to re-
call. Thus, the power remained always in the hands of the mass
as a whole.
Public service was to be performed at a workman's wage.
Thus was laid the basis of inexpensive government. The hierarchic
divisions of labor were given further blows. The decree separating
church and state abolished religious control of education and
41
THE PARIS COMMUNE

kindled intellectual life on all fronts. True to their proletarian

spirit, some districts began immediately to clothe and feed their
children. Education was to be open ·and free to all. Even above
that, the reorganization of the methods of education was to begin
with the fullest participation of the whole people. The first call
went out to teachers and parents. The teachers were instructed
"to employ exclusively the experimental and scientific method, that
which starts from facts, physical, moral and intellectual."
The utopians had been busy inventing political forms of
rule; the anarchists had been ignoring all political forms; the
petty-bourgeois democrats had been accepting the parliamentary
form. But this Commune was what the workers came up with-
smash the state form of capital's rule; supercede it by a commune-
type of self-government. This then was "'the political form at last
discovered to work out the economic emancipation of the prole-
tariat." Marx had deduced from history that the bourgeois state
form would disappear and the proletariat, organized as the ruling
class, would be the point of transition to a classless society. He
hailed the heroism of the Communards. He studied their specific
form of proletarian rule and disclosed its secret: "The political
rule of the producer cannot coexist with the perpetuation of his
social slavery."66
The inseparability of politics and economics was established
by the Commune, by its own working existence. Its Commission
of Labor and Exchange, staffed mainly by members of the Inter-
national, accomplished its greatest work, not in the decrees it passed,
but in the stimulation it gave to workers to take things into their
own hands. It began by asking the workers to reopen the works
which had been abandoned by their owners and to run them by
"the cooperative association of the workers employed in them." The
aim was to transform land and means of production into mere
instruments of "free and associated labor."
The Commune's workshops were models of proletarian dem·
ocracy. The workers themselves appointed the directors, shop and
bench foremen. These were subject to dismissal by the workers if
relations or conditions proved unsatisfactory. Not only were wages,
hours, and working conditions set, above all, a factory committee
met every evening to discuss the next day's work.
42
 MARXISM AND FREEDOM

Thus, plain working men, under circumstances of unexampled

difficulty, governed, themselves. The Commune, by being the self·
government of the producers, set free all the elements of the future
society. Marx described it as "Working, thinking, fighting, bleed·
ing Paris-almost forgetful, in its incubation of a new society, of
the cannibals at its gates-radiant in the enthusiasm of its his-
toric initiativef"67
The spontaneous mass outburst that took this form of the
Commune of Paris lasted only two months before the Parisian
workers were massacred in one of the bloodiest terrors in history;
But, in those two short months before the blood bath, the workers
accomplished more miracles than capitalism had in as many cen-
turies. The greatest miracle was its working existence. It abolished
the standing army and armed the people instead. It smashed to
smithereens State bureaucratism, placed public officials on a work-
man's salary and made them subject to recall. It abolished the
division of labor between the legislative and the executive and
transformed the parliament from a talking to a working body. It
created new conditions for labor. On all fronts, the creative initia-
tive of the masses had ensured the maximum activity for the masses
and the minimum for their elected representatives. It thus stripped
the fetishisms off all forms of rule: economic, political, intellectual.

3) The Fetishism of Commodities and Plan vs. Freely Associated

Labor and Control of Production
The totality of the reorganization of society by the Com-
munards shed new insight into the perversity of relations under
capitalism. By smashing the old State-form and superseding it
with the Commune, an end had been put to the hierarchic divi-
sfon of labor, including the division between politics and economics.
By exposing the bourgeois State as the public force of social en-
slavement that it was, the proletariat demonstrated how the abso-
lutely new form of cooperation, released from its value"integument,
expresses itself. This was so clearly the absolute opposite of the
dialectic movement of labor under capitalism, forced into a value-
form, that all the fetishisms were stripped off of capitalist pro-
duction.
43
THE PARIS COMMUNE

Before the Commune, Marx had written that only freely asso-
ciated labor could strip off the fetishism from commodities. Now
that the Communards did precisely that, the concrete doing ex-
tended the theory. In the "Civil War in France," Marx writes
that what has now become clear is this: if cooperative production
itself is not to become ···a sham and a snare," it must be under
the workers' own control. At the same time, he prepares a new,
French edition of CAPITAL and there, as he tells us in the
afterword, 68 he has changed the section on fetishism of commodi-
ties "in a significant manner.'' Marx asks: "Whence then arises
the enigmatical character of the product of labour, so soon as it
assumes the form of commodities?"69 And he answers simply:
"Clearly from this form itself.''
Previous to this edition, this was not so clear to anyone,
not even to Marx. The simplicity of expression achieved in 1872 is
worth tracing, especially since the significance has been lost.
There is nothing simple about a commodity. It is a great
fetish that makes the despotic conditions of capitalist production
appear as if they were self-evident truths of social production.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Just as these condi-
tions were historically determined and rest on the servitude of
the laborer, so the commodity, from the start of capitalism, is a
reflection of the dual character of labor. It is, from the start, a
unity of opposites-use-value and value-which, in embryo, con-
tains all the contradictions of capitalism.
This simple relationship was beyond the perception of the
greatest bourgeois economist, Ricardo, despite the earlier dis-
covery of labor as the source of value. Although classical political
economy had reduced value to its labor content, it had never
once asked WHY did this content, labor, assume this form, value?
Long before CAPITAL, Marx had analyzed the duality per-
vading bourgeois society: "In our days everything seems pregnant
with its contrary; machinery, gifted with the wonderful power
of shortening and fructifying human labor, we behold starving and
overworking it. The new-fangled sources of wealth, by some strange
weird spell, are turned into sources of want. The victories of arms
seem bought by the loss of character. At the same pace that man-
kind masters nature, man seems to become enslaved to other men
44
 MARXISM AND FREEDOM

or to his own infamy. Even the pure light of science seems unable
to shine but on a dark background of ignorance. All our inven·
tions and progress seem to result in endowing material forces
with intellectual life, and in stultifying human life into a material
force. This antagonism between modern industry and science
on the one hand, modern misery and dissolution on the other
hand; this antagonism between the productive powers and the so-
cial relations of our epoch is a fact, palpable, overwhelming, and
not to be controverted."70
In general, but only in general, the logic of content and form
of labor was actual to Marx's thinking from the very beginning
when he worked out the concept of alienated labor. Nevertheless,
insofar as economic categories were concerned, he accepted them,
more or less, as worked out by classical political economy. That is
true as late as the publication of Critique of Political Economy in
1859, when he still used exchange-value in the sense of value and
not in the sense of value-form. He still was "taking for granted"
that "everyone knows" that production relations are really involved
in the exchange of things.
By 1867, in the first edition of CAPITAL, he singles out the
commodity-form as the fetish. Even here, the main emphasis is
on the fantastic form of appearance of production relations as ex-
change of things. It is only after the eruption of the Paris Com-
mune that his French edition shifts the emphasis from the fan-
tastic form of appearance to the necessity of that form of appear-
ance because that is, in truth, what relations of people are at the
point of production: "material relations between persons and
social relations between things."
Having located the trouble at its source, Marx sees that a
product of labor can have no other form than that of a commodity.
Thus, to the question: whence the fetishism of commodities?-the
answer is simple and direct: "Clearly from the form itself."
It is not that Marx did not "know," before the Paris Commune,
that everything under capitalism is perverted. He "knew" that the
machine dominates man, not man the machine. He "knew" that all
science is embodied in the machine rather than in the actual
producers. He wrote often enough that all human relations are
confined and perverted under capitalism. He stressed that it can-
45
THE PARIS COMMUNE

not be otherwise so long as the process of production has mastery

over man instead of being controlled by him.
This perverse relation of subject to object is so all-pervading
that it has in its grip the oppressor class. That is why classical po-
litical economy could not dissolve the mystery. It met here its
historic barrier.
"The value-form of the product of labor is not only the
most abstract, but is also the most universal form, taken by the
product in bourgeois production, and stamps that production as a
particular species of social production and thereby gives it its
special historical character. If then we treat this mode of produc-
tion as one eternally fixed for every state of society, we necessarilv
overlook that which is the differentia specifica of the value-form,
and consequently the commodity-form and of the further develop-
ments, money-form, capital-form, etc."71
What was new was that the Commune, by releasing labor
from the confines of value production, showed how people asso-
ciated freely without the despotism of capital or the mediation of
things. Contrast the expansiveness of that movement with the mu-
tilation of labor under capitalism, which robs the workers of all
individuality and reduces them merely to a component of labor
in general. That is the specific character of labor under capitalism.
The value-form, which alone contains the reduction of the many,
varied, concrete labors into one abstract mass, is the necessary re-
sult of this specific character of capitalist labor.
The Commune transformed the whole question of form from
a debate among intellectuals to the serious activity of workers-
" facing with sober senses the conditions of their being and their
relations with their kind." By dealing with their social relations
openly and directly, they reorganized them completely and thm
established a new social order. All existing relations were involved:
production, property, the State, the market, the plan, the law of
motion of the economy. The full and free development of each in-
dividual, once begun in the Commune, had become the condition
for the full and free development of all.
The richness of human traits, revealed in the Commune,
showed in sharp relief that the fetishism of commodities arises
from the commodity form itself. This deepened the meaning of the
46
 MARXISM AND FREEDOM:

form of value both as a logical development and as a social

phenomenon.
Marx never looked at concrete events one-sidedly to see how
they conformed to his previously-established theory. The theory
always gained in depth by the processes of history itself. Not alone
was the form of value fully illuminated. Important additions were
introduced into the final part, on the "Accumulation of Capital."
In analyzing the "General Law of Capitalist Accumulation," Marx
now poses the question of the ultimate development of the law
of concentration and centralization of capital: "In a given society,
the limit would be reached at the moment when the entire social
capital were united in the hands either of a single capitalist or a
single capitalist corporation."7 2
Yet the importance of this crucial addition, with which we
shall deal in detail when we analyze our own age of state capitalism
in Part V, is not in the prediction of state capitalism, but in the
fact that nothing fundamental is changed in the relations between
classes by such an extreme development. On the contrary, all
contradictions are pushed to the extreme. What was new was the
concreteness this gave to Marx's concept of the relationship of the
ideal to the real. "They (the Communards) have no ideals to
realize," he writes, "but to set free the elements of the new
society. "7 3

47
 CHAPTER SEVEN

THE HUMANISM AND DIALECTIC OF

CAPIT AL, VOLUME I, 1867 TO 1883

1) The Split in the Category of Labor: Abstract and Concrete

Labor, Labor and Labor Power

"All understanding of the facts depends

upon a comprehension of this dual char-
acter of labor."-K. Marx

Marx begins CAPITAL as he began Critique, with an analysis

of the dual character of the commodity. He moves straightaway
from the duality of use-value and value of the commodity to the
dual character of labor itself. He considers the analysis of abstract
and concrete labor as his original contribution to political economy,
''the pivot on which a clear comprehension of political economy
turns."74 He tirelessly reminds us, in his correspondence, that
since "all" understanding depends upon this, "It is emphasized in
the first chapter." 75 As we saw from his earlier writings, for Marx
the whole of human history could be traced through the develop-
ment of labor. The evolution of man from lower to higher stages
takes place by means of the developing process of labor. Labor
has transformed the natural conditions of human existence into
social conditions. In primitive communism, labor was a mode of
self-activity, the creative function of man, which flowed from his
natural capacities and developed his natural talents further. In
his contact with nature, primitive man, despite the limitations
of his knowledge, exercised not only his labor power but his judg-
ment as well. He thus developed himself and nature.

48
 MARXISM AND FREEDOM

The social division of labor was the necessary prerequisite

for moulding nature to man's will and creating new productive
forces. However, this undermined the collective nature of pro-
duction and appropriation. Producers no longer consumed directly
what they produced and they lost control over the products of their
labor. Man is essentially a tool-making animal and the process
of the production of his material life, the process of labor, means
the process of the growth of the productive forces and his command
over nature. We have seen Marx explain industry as "the real his-
toric relation of nature, and consequently the science of nature,
to man."
The Industrial Revolution, the progress of natural science
and the general technological advance so revolutionized the mode
of production that finally there arose a true basis for freedom.
However, with the division of labor-the most monstrous of which
is the division between mental and manual labor-class societies
arose. The separation of intellectual and physical labor stands
in the way of man's full development. Labor in class societies-
whether they be slave, feudal or capitalist orders-no longer means
the free development of the physical and intellectual energy of
man. It has reached its most alienated aspect under capitalism
where not only the product of his labor is alienated from the la-
borer, but his very mode of activity also. It has ceased to be "the
first necessity of living" and has become a mere means to life. La-
bor has become a drudgery man must perform to earn a living, and
not a mode of activity in which he realizes his physical aml mental
potentialities. He is no longer interested in the development of the
productive forces and, in fact, the productive forces seem to
develop independently of him. Labor has become a means of cre-
ating wealth and "is no longer grown together with the individual
into one particular destination.''76
What is new in CAPITAL, both as compared to the early
works where he uses the term alienated labor and calls for "its
abolition," and as compared to the Critique where it "is no longer
grown together with the individual into one particular destina-
tion," is that Marx now goes directly to the labor process itself.
The analysis of the capitalistic labor process is the cornerstone
of the Marxian theory. Here we see what kind of labor produces
49
THE HUMANISM AND DIALECTIC OF CAPITAL, VOL. I

value-abstract labor-and how concrete individual labor with spe-

cific skills becomes reduced, by the discipline of the factory clock,
to nothing but a producer of a mass of congealed, abstract labor.
There is no such creature as an "abstract laborer"; one is a
miner or a tailor or a steelworker or a baker. Nevertheless, the
perverse nature of capitalist production is such that man is not
master of the machine; the machine is master of the man. Through
the instrumentality of the machine, which expresses itself in the
ticking of a factory clock, it has indeed become immaterial what
the skill of man is so long as each produces a given quantity of
products in a given time. Socially-necessary labor time is the hand-
maiden of the machine which accomplishes the fantaHic trans-
formation of all concrete labors into one abstract mass. Constant
technological revolutions change how much labor time is socially
necessary. If what took an hour to produce yesterday takes only
one-half hour to produce today, that is what the factory clock
is now set at. Specific skills do not count. All must subordinate
themselves to the newly-set socially necessary time to be expended
on commodities. Competition in the market will see that it be done.
Paid or unpaid, all labor is forced labor. Every instant of it.
With his analysis of what kind of labor produces value and surplus
value, and how this is done, Marx transcended Ricardo. At one
and the same time, he extricated the Ricardian labor theory of
value from its contradictions and transformed it into a theory
of surplus value.
Some Marxists have treated the phenomenon of alienated
labor as if it were a leftover from Marx's Young Hegelian days
that stuck to him before he succeeded in working his way out of
philosophic jargon into "materialism." The mature Marx, on the
other hand, shows that to be the very pivot on which turns, not
alone the science or literature of political economy, but the produc-
tive system itself. There is nothing intellectual or deductive about
the worker's individual skills being alienated from him to become
social labor whose only specific feature is that it is '"human." It is
a very real and very degrading labor process which accomplishes this
transformation. It is called the factory. Marx's concept of the de-
graded worker seeking universality, seeking to be a whole man,

50
 MARXISM AND FREEDOM

transformed the science of political economy into the scien~e of

human liberation.
As· we showed, Marxism is wrongly considered to be "a new
political economy." In truth, it is a critique of the very foundations.
of political economy which is nothing else than the bourgeois mode
of thought of the bourgeois mode of production. By introducing
the laborer into political economy, Marx transformed it from a.
science which deals with things, such as commodities, money, wages,
pFofits, into one which analyzes relations of men at the point of
production. It is true that man's cardinal tie, in this historic, that
is, transitory, system called capitalism, is exchange and that this
makes social relations between men appear as relations between
things. But these things belie, instead of manifest, the essence. To
separate the essence-the social relations-from the appearance-
the exchange of things-required a new science that was at the
same time a philosophy of history. That new phenomenon is Marx-
ism.
It is characteristic of Marx, known the world over as the
creator of the theory of surplus value, to disclaim the honor be-
cause the theory was "implicit" in the classical theory of labor
value. What he did that was new, he said, was to make this explicit
by showing what type of labor creates values and hence surplus
values, and the process by which this is done. What kept others from
seeing it, is that they had kept a goodly distance away from the
factory. They remained in the market place, in the sphere of cir-
culation, and it is this "which furnishes the 'Free-trader Vulgaris'
with his views and ideas and the standard by which he judges
society based on capital and wages." But once you leave the market
place where "alone rule Freedom, Equality, Property and Bentham,"
you can perceive "a change in the physiognomy of our dramatis
personae. He who before was the money owner, now strides in
front as the capitalist; the possessor of labor power follows as his la-
borer. The one with an air of importance, smirking, intent on
business; the other, timid and holding back, like the one who is
bringing his own hide to market and has nothing to expect but-
a hiding."n
Ricardo had been unable to extricate his labor theory of value
from the contradictions that befell it when it came to this most
51
THE HUMANISM AND DIALECTIC OF CAPITAL, VOL. I

important exchange between capital and labor. Marx, on the

<>ther hand, was able to demonstrate how inequality arose out of the
equality of the market.
That is because, in the millions of commodities exchanged
daily, one and only one, labor power, is incorporated in a living
person. A $5 bill or a piece of cloth has the same value in the
market as at home or in the factory or in the pocket. Labor power,
on the other hand, has first to be utilized, put to work in the fac-
tory. The laborer, therefore, can be, and is, made to work more
than it takes to reproduce him. When he finds that out, his voice
.. stifled in the storm and stress of the process of production,"
cries out: ''That which appears on your side as self-expansion of
value, is, on my side, an extra expenditure of labor power.'' 7 8 It
is too late. His commodity, labor power, no longer belongs to him,
but to the one who bought it. He is therefore told unceremoniously
that he can quit if he wants to, but so long as he is in the factory
he must work under the command of the capitalist. He must sub-
<>rdinate himself to the machine and obey the factory clock.
The capitalist is most righteous about the whole transaction.
He hasn't cheated. He has a contract with the laborer, duly executed
:according to the laws of exchange: so much money for so many
hours of labor. The utility of a thing, he tells the laborer, belongs
to him who has paid the exchange value. He has paid so much
money for a day's labor, and he has as much right over it as the
laborer over his wages. He, the capitalist, doesn't follow him, the
worker, to see whether he is a good provider and brings his $5
bill home to his wife, or whether he goes to the bar to drink it
down. Why then can't the laborer be as considerate of the capitalist's
right over his product? In any case, the worker can take it or leave
it. But so long as he is in the factory-and here the voice of "Mr.
Moneybags" is full of unquestioned, military authority-the worker
had better know who is boss.
It is too bad that labor power cannot be disembodied from
the laborer. If it could, he would let the laborer go and use only
the commodity-labor power-which rightfully belongs to him
since he has paid for it. Thus he concludes quite piously that he
hasn't violated any laws including the Ricardian law of value.
52
 MARXISM AND FREEDOM

This is true. The law does hold in the factory. But in the
factory "it" is no longer a commodity-"it" is the activity itself,
labor. True, the living laborer is made to work beyond the value
of his labor power. His sweat congeals into unpaid labor. That pre-
cisely is the "miracle" of surplus value: that labor power is incor-
porated in the living laborer, who can be, and is, made to pro-
duce a greater value than he himself is.
The failure of the Ricardian theory to explain the exchange
between capital and labor, on the basis of its own primary law of
labor value, meant the disintegration of that school. It was a
fatal failure for it could not explain how it is that labor-the
source and creator of all values-becomes the poorer the more
values the worker creates. Utopian socialism could move nowhere
because it remained a prisoner of the economic categories of Ri-
cardo.
Marx broke through the barriers both because he split the
categories created by classical political economy, and created new
categories. He rejected the concept of labor as a commodity. La-
bor is an activity, not a commodity. It was no accident that Ricardo
used one and the same word for the activity and for the com-
modity. He was a prisoner of his concept of the human laborer as
a thing. Marx, on the other hand, showed that what the laborer
sold was not his labor, but only his capacity to labor, his labor
power.
Two principles are involved here, one flowing from theory
and the other from practice. By splitting the old category, labor,
into (I) labor as activity or function, and (2) ability to labor,
or labor power, the commodity, Marx forged a new theoretical
weapon with which to investigate the new material forces that
developed outside of the old category. The very term, labor power.
opened al~ sorts of.new doors of comprehension. It enabled him to
make a leap in thought to correspond with the new activity of
workers.
Proof of this new power on the part of the theoretician,
even as the new power in the worker, is to be seen most clearly
in the short chapter in CAPIT AL on "Cooperation." Its twenty-
five pages seem merely to describe how men work together to
produce things, but in reality, by analyzing how men work to-
53
THE HUMANISM AND DIALECTIC OF CAPITAL, VOL. I

gether, Marx described how a new social power is created. He

could discover this new social power in production because, first
of all, he distinguished between the productivity of machines and
the productivity of men. What characterizes CAPITAL from be-
ginning to end is the concern with living human beings. Marx
lived in the second half of the nineteenth century when most
theoreticians believed that as technology advanced, all of humanity's
problems would be solved. Because Marx thought first and fore-
most of how the workers feel, he could anticipate the key ques-
tion of our epoch: is productivity to be increased by the expansion
of machinery or by the expansion of human capacities?
Capitalists and their ideologists think always of expanding
productivity by more perfect machines. What happens to the
worker as a result, well, that is just something that "can't be
helped." Their governing principle is to keep their eyes on econ-
omies and the expansion of machinery. That, said Marx, is "quite
in keeping with the spirit of capitalist production."
At the opposite pole from these, Marx was concerned with
the worker's "own personal productiveness." That is the class line
which he draws. Starting from these premises-so strange to the
intellectual and so natural to the worker who has worked in large-
scale production-Marx was able to discover that what is involved
in the cooperation of many workers is a productive force. Marx is
not dealing with a simple sum of individuals. No words can substi-
tute for Marx's: "Not only have we here an increase in the produc-
tive power of the individual by means of cooperation, but the cre-
ation of a new power, namely, the collective power of masses."79
New powers are not easily imagined or created. It requires
a revolution in thought to understand them, as it requires a revo-
lution in society to create them. Marx analyzed this new social
power. He indicated the new psychological powers that are de-
veloped through cooperation: "'hands and eyes both before and
behind." He insisted that this new capacity must not be explained
away merely by calling it a heightening in the mechanical force
of labor; nor was it merely an extension of action over a greater
space. What is developed is a new social force:
"The special productive power of the combined working day
is, under all circumstances, the social productive force of labor,
54
 MARXISM AND FREEDOM

or the productive power of social labor. This power is due to

cooperation itself. When the laborer cooperates systematically with
others, he strips off the fetters of his individuality and develops
the capacities of his species."80
Marx has here deepened his earlier concept of the workers'
"quest for universality." It is no longer an ideological force alone,
it has now become a powerful material force as well. In Poverty of
Philosophy, Marx wrote: "But from the moment that all special
development ceases, the need for universality, the tendency towards
an integral development of the individual begins to make itself
felt."8 1
In CAPITAL, he shows how the stripping off the fetters of
individuality and the development of capacities of the human
species, discloses what is second nature to workers as the result of
years in large-scale production-the vast store of creative energy
latent in them.
Capitalism knows this new social power as. a rival and an
opponent. The capitalist Plan exists to stifle and suppress it. In
his chapter on "Cooperation," Marx first develops his concept of
capitalist Plan, how to the workers "the connection existing between
their various labors appears to them, ideally, in the shape of a
preconceived plan of the capitalist, and practically in the shape of
the authority of the same capitalist, in the shape of the powerful
will of another, who subjects their activity to his aims."8 2 Our
age sheds a new illumination here since we see that management,
whether state capitalist or private corporative, claims its Plan is
necessary because the work is complicated and requires direction.
The workers are not deceived by these claims. They know from their
daily experiences of the wanton waste which goes hand in hand
with the tyranny of capitalist Plans. The intellectuals are the ones
who are deceived. They say there are two sides of the Capitalist
Plan: the "good" side of leadership and foresight, and the "bad"
side of domination.
This distinction exists only in their minds. Practically, in the
lives of the workers the authority of the capitalists is "the power-
ful will of another who subjects their activities to his aims." Here,
again, because the only reality for Marx is the actual experience
of the workers, he cuts through the treacherous illusions about Plan.
55
THE HUMANISM AND DIALECTIC OF CA.PIT AL, VOL. I

Ideology and economy are as integrally connected with the

historic movement as are content and form to a work of literature.ss
This shines forth from that most remarkable piece of analysis
in the annals of political economy, "The Fetishism of Commodi-
ties." In this section, Marx demonstrates that the appearance of
capitalist wealth, as an accumulation of commodities, is not mere
show. The appearance dazzles the sight and makes relations be-
tween men seem to partake of "'the mystical character of commodi-
ties." That a relationship between men appears as a relationship
between things is, of course, fantastic. It is characteristic of the
narrowness of bourgeois thought which not only created the fetish-
ism, but became its victim. Even classical political economy, which
discovered labor as the source of value, could not escape being held
a prisoner by this "mystical character of commodities."
Under capitalism, relations between men appear as relations
between things because that is what "they really are." The machine
is master of man and consequently man is less than a thing. So
perverse is the nature of capitalist production that the fantastic
fetishism of commodities is its true nature. Marx states that only
freely associated labor will be able to strip the fetishism off of
commodities.
By tracing the dialectical development of this fetishism, Marx
arrives at the class nature of the value form. That is when Marx
first asks the question: Whence does the fetishism arise?-and
answers, "Clearly from the form itself." The fetishism of com-
modities is the opiate which passes itself off as the mind,84 the
ideology of capitalistic society. It is false from top to bottom and.
holds prisoner both the capitalist and his intellectual representa-
tive. As far back as in the Communist Manifesto, Marx showed
that the capitalists are unable to grasp the truth that capitalism
is a transitional social order because they and their ideologists
transform "into eternal laws of nature and reason the social forms
springing from the present mode of production." Because they
do not see the future, the next social order, they cannot under-
stand the present. Proletarian knowledge, on the other hand, grasps
the truth of the present. Because it is not a passive, but an active
force, it at the same time restores the unity of theory and practice.
56
 MARXISM AND FREEDOM

,2) The Marxian Economic Categories and the Struggle at the

Point of Production: Constant and Variable Capital, or the
Domination of Dead over Living Labor
"The Hegelian contradiction (is) the
source of all dialectic."85
In analyzing the economic system of capitalism, Marx wrote
some five thousand pages, or about two million words. Throughout
this gigantic work, he was able to use the categories already es-
tablished by classical economy. He refined value-and with it sur-
plus value-but he took over the categories themselves from clas-
sical economics. In three instances, and in three instances only, he
·had to create entirely new categories. These are: labor power,
constant capital and variable capital. It cannot be stressed often
enough that all the new categories flow from Marx's original
contribution to political economy-the analysis of the duality of
labor itself-for it is out of the split in the category of labor into
concrete and abstract labor that these new categories emerged.
Having already dealt with labor power, we now turn to the other
two categories.
Heretofore economic science had made a distinction only
between fixed and circulating capital. This distinction flowed
from the process of circulation, not from the process of production.
The process of production, however, is what determines all else.
Constant and variable capital are of the essence once you try to
analyze the process of production itself. Labor power and means
of production are of course the main elements of any social system
of production but only under capitalism do they unite as "the
different modes of existence which the value of the original cap-
ital assumed when from being money it was transformed into
the various factors of the labor process": variable capital and
constant capital.
(1) Constant capital comprises the means of production and
raw materials, the dead labor. They undergo no change in magni-
tude in the process of production. Their value has been established
by the labor process from which they issued. In whole or in part
57
THE HUMANISM AND DIALECTIC OF CAPITAL, VOL. I

they yield their value to the commodities, but they cannot yield
more than they have.
(2) Variable capital is labor power in the actual process of
production. It does undergo a variation in the magnitude since
it reproduces not only its own value, but an unpaid surplus. In a
word, the laborer cannot quit work when he sees he has already
produced the equivalent of his wages because the factory clock
says it is only noon, and not quitting time.
l\farx is most specific and adamant about naming both factors
of production capital.
There was dead labor or machines, or at least tools in pre-
capitalist societies but dead labor did not dominate living labor.
The savage was the complete master of his bow and arrow. It
did not dominate him; he dominated it. The serf was without
a tractor and had to use a wooden hoe. But that crude instrument
did not have a value which asserted its independence in the process
of production so that the energy of the living laborer was a mere
means for its expansion. Automation, however, means that more
and more machines need less and less living labor, and more and
more efficient machines need less and less skill in the general
mass of human labor.
The worker is unable to resist this "process of suction" 11 6
because he is now but a component part of capital, "a simple,
monotonous, productive force that does not have to have either
bodily or intellectual faculties." The radio assembler whose line
has to produce 75 to 90 radios an hour will not stop to inquire
into its mechanics. He will know only that it means making eight
connections per radio, and the wires mean to him only blue, red
and green colors so that his eye can pick them out without stop-
ping to consider. He will twist about 4800 wires per day, and his
hands will handle the pair of pliers with such speed that the
chassis do not pile up alongside his bench. That will be proof
to the boss that he can keep up with the line, that he is a good
means for the expansion of value.
This, Marx calls the real subordination of labor to capital.
That is how accumulated labor dominates living labor. It is this
domination which turns accumulated labor into capital, a force
divorced from the direct producer and exploiting him. Therein is
58
 MARXISM AND FREEDOM

the antagonism between accumulated labor and living labor. Liv-

ing labor faces dead labor as its mortal enemy. Under capitalism,
wrote Marx, all conditions of existence have become so concen-
trated and sharpened that they have been reduced to two: accumu-
lated labor and living labor, that is to say, constant capital and
variable capital.
The antagonism between accumulated labor and living labor
becomes personified in the struggle between the capitalist and the
worker but the mastery of the capitalist over the worker is "only
the mastery of things over man, of dead labor over living labor." 87
Because the domination of dead over living labor character-
izes the. whole of modern society, Marx calls capital "'value big
with value, a live monster that is fruitful and multiplies."8 8 Yet
at every critical turn in history even Marxists, as we shall see
when we deal with Rosa Luxemburg, have tried to denude these
categories of their specifically capitalist character which, as Engels
put it, gives them their "peculiar distinctness." They have blinded
themselves to Marx's methodology which took its point of depar-
ture from the real world in which he lived.
The economic reality determined the structure of Marx's
work. He no sooner established the two new categories-constant
and variable capital-than he departed from the abstraction of
theory to the actual struggles of the working class against what
he called the capitalist's "werewolf hunger for surplus labor,"
which expresses itself at first in an unremitting attempt to lengthen
the working day. Surplus value produced through the extension
of the working day Marx calls absolute surplus value.
Whoever thinks that Marx spent sixty-four pages on "sob-
story stuff" is totally blind to the fact that society itself would
have collapsed had the worker not fought for the shorten~ng of the
working day. The section on the "Working Day" is one of the
unique contributions to the analysis of human society. Any strug-
gle by the workers to establish a normal working day was met
with hostile opposition by the powers of the State as well as by
the might of the capitalist. This "protracted civil war"se curbed
the capitalist's disregard for human life. In three generations,
capitalism used up nine generations of spinners. The workers learned
59
THE HUMANISM AND DIALECTIC OF CAPITAL, VOL. I

labor solidarity and organized themselves against this mass slaugh-

ter.
Capitalism fought back with an even more potent factor than
the State's extension of the working day. Technological develop-
ment made possible the extraction of greater surplus value within
the same working day. By the time we reach Machinofacture, we
can see how Marx's new categories-constant and variable capital
-illuminate the ever greater contradictions of capitalist produc-
tion. The constant capital-the machinery-undergoes no change
in value, no matter how light or how hard it is worked. The la-
borer, with his concrete type of labor, can transfer the value
of the machine to the new product only to the extent of its original
value, that is to say, the socially necessary labor time it took to
produce it. As dead matter, machinery is incapable of creating
value and gains nothing from the labor process. The capitalist
is therefore fully dependent on his other type of capital, variable
capital-the labor power of the living laborer, who, therefore,
must be forced to produce ever more. When this can no longer
be done through the lengthening of the working day, it must
be done by speed-up. This is where the factory clock plays its
part. It is now not merely a sort of counting machine for the
quantity of output. It has become a measure of the intensity of
labor itself. The surplus labor or value thus extracted is related
directly to the wear and tear of the laborer himself. Where the
extraction of surplus value, by lengthening the working day, was
the production of absolute surplus value, the extraction of surplus
value with a given working day is the production of relative sur-
plus value. In machine-ism, capitalism has not merely a productive
force; it has a force to strike down the hand of labor to the right
degree of intensity and docility, "a barrack discipline."90
When machine-ism is organized into a system, when it be-
comes the body of the factory, its spirit is incorporated in the fac-
tory clock. The function of the capitalist is to extract as much,
and more, surplus value within the given working day, as he
had previously extracted during an elastic working day. The
machine must justify its cost of production by lengthening that
part of the working day in which the worker produces the surplus
60
 MARXISM AND FREEDOM

above what is necessary to maintain him and have him reproduce

his kind.
Cheaper goods make this possible. That is all the liberals
saw. Marx saw the greater exploitation of the worker, the greater
contradiction in capitalist production. From the very start Marx
noted: "An increase in the quantity of use-values is an increase
of material wealth. With two coats two men can be clothed, with
one coat only one man. Nevertheless, an increased quantity of
material wealth may correspond to a simultaneous fall in the
magnitude of its value. The antagonistic movement has its origin
in the two-fold character of labor."9 1
At the beginning, the bourgeois ideologists' relation to science
was unambiguous. Professor Ure was most frank: "When capitalism
enlists science into her service, the refractory hand of labor will
always be taught docility."92 The rejoicing was loud and clear.
"One of the most singular advantages we derive from machinery,"
Marx quotes Barbage, '"is in the check it affords against the inat-
tention, idleness and knavery of human agents." If, with Automa-
tion, and the experience of a few revolutions, the capitalists and
their ideologists boast only of "the magic carpet" of the new in-
dustrial revolution which "lightens" work, it is nevertheless true
that machinery has not only superseded the skill and strength of the
worker, it has put a greater nervous as well as physical strain on
him the greater effort per unit of labor time. Marx saw all this one
hundred years ago. He described the method whereby millions of
specific types of labor are transformerl into one abstract mass,
and he focused on the domination of capital through the "peculiar
distinctness" of his original categories: constant and variable
capital.
The role played in the production of absolute surplus value
by the struggle for the shortening of the working day is now
played by the "Strife between Workman and Machinery." Pro-
fessional Marxists have too sophisticated an attitude to the revolts
which have raged throughout the history of capitalism. They
manage to "take the revolts for granted."
They act as if they were ashamed (and many are) of the
period when workers broke up machines. They would have "pre-
ferred" it if the workers had, instead, fought with "the real
61
THE HUMANISM AND DIALECTIC OF CAPITAL, VOL. I

enemy" on the political front. Yet these very acts by the workers
against the machines Marx called "revolts against this particu-
lar form of the means of production as being the material basis
of the capitalist mode of production." These professional Marxists
thus miss the central point of Marxian theory th,at revolt marks
every stage of capitalist progress. As Marx puts it: '''It would be
possible to write quite a history of the inventions, made since
1830, for the sole purpose of supplying capital with weapons
against the revolts of the working class."93 The revolt caused
the change to advanced methods; the revolt saved the life of the
country. In turn, each revolt caused a greater centralization, ex-
ploitation, socialization and greater organization, both objectively
and subjectively, of the proletariat.
There are two movements in CAPITAL: the historical and the
logical. The historical includes the origins of capitalism which
Marx calls "The Primitive Accumulation of Capital." The power
of the State was employed "to hasten, in hothouse fashion, the
process of transformation of the feudal mode of production into
the capitalist mode." Marx shows, first, that "the 'expropriation
of the agricultural producer, of the peasant, from the soil, is the
basis of the whole process,"9 4 and then says, of the genesis of the
industrial capitalist: "The discovery of gold and silver in America,
the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the
aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting
of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the
commercial hunting of black-skins, signalised the rosy dawn of the
era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the
chief momenta of primitive accumulation." 95 But all this is pre-
liminary to the actual development of capitalist production.
The three stages of development of capitalist production
itself are: (I) Co9peration; (2) Division of Labor and Manufac-
ture; and (3) Machinofacture. Just as out of the historical develop-
ment of the expropriated peasant, so out of the logical develop-
ment of capitalism, we reach the point of no return-concentra-
tion and centralization of capiJal at one end, and the socialization
and revolt of labor, at the otner end.
The commodity of commodities in capitalist society is labor
power. The whole society is governed by the necessity of producing
62
 MARXISM AND FREEDOM

labor power according to the labor time necessary for the pro-
duction of this commodity. Hence the cost of the laborer is the
first consideration of the capitalist. Let us repeat: it is his first
consideration. He must keep its cost down.
Unless he constantly increases the amount of accumulated
labor, expands, or reorganizes his plant or does all three things,
the value of his productive system not only declines but disappears
altogether. In normal times he loses his market because he cannot
sell. In abnormal times he is defeated in battle and his whole
productive system is bodily taken away from him. Therefore his
main concern must always be to increase the value of such capital
as he has. Now-and again we owe this to Marx-the only power of
increasing the capital is the amount of living labor which he can
apply to the capital which he already has. Therefore his main
concern is to augment value, that is, to create surplus value, to
gain a value greater than the value which he expends. This is the
essence of capitalist production. This is what Marx called "the
characteristic specific nature of capitalist production."
The modern bourgeoisie has emasculated the word, revolu-
tionary, so that it is equivalent to nothing but a violent overthrow
in the dark of night, "a conspiracy." In truth, as compared to every
previous social order, capitalism was the most revolutionary not
because of its violent overthrow of the old, feudal order, but be-
cause of its daily technological revolutions. In the Communist
Manifesto, the young Marx had written:
"The bourgeoisie cannot exist without continually revolution-
izing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of
production and all the social relations. Conservatism, in an unal-
tered form, of the old modes of production, was on the contrary
the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes.
Constant revolution in production, uninterrupted disturbance of all
social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation, distinguish
the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen
relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and
opinions, are swept away, all new formed ones become antiquated
before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is
holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober
senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind."
63
THE HUMANISM AND DIALECTIC OF CAPITAL, VOL. I

The mature Marx quotes precisely this passage when, in his

analysis of "Machinery and Modern Industry," he reaches the
"absolute contradiction between the technical necessities of Mod-
ern Industry and the social character inherent in its capitalistic
form," and sees how "'this antagonism vents its rage in the creation
o_f that monstrosity, an industrial reserve army," and "the devasta-
tion caused by a social anarchy which turns every economical
progress into a social calamity."96
Marx stresses that this is "the negative side." He shows how
the resistance of the workers is the positive aspect which compels
Modern Industry "under the penalty of death" to replace the mere
fragment of a man "by the fully developed individual, fit for a
variety of labors, ready to face any change in production, and to
whom the different social functions he performs, are but so many
modes of giving free scope to his own natural and acquired
powers." 91
Having traced the dialectical development of the two op-
posites, living labor and dead labor, labor and machinery, from
"Cooperation" through the "Division of Labor and Manufacture"
to "Machinery and Modern Industry," Marx concludes that there
is no other than the historical solution to the "revolutionary fer-
ments, the final result of which is the abolition of the old division
of labor, diametrically opposed to the capitalistic form of pro-
duction and to the economic status of the laborer corresponding
to that form."97 The penalty of death hanging over the capitalis-
tic mode of production, and the elements of the socialist society
which are imbedded in the old, will clash head-on in "The Accu-
mulation of Capital," the final part of Marx's great work.

64
 MARXISM AND FREEDOM

3) Accumulation of Capital, and the New Forces and New Passions

"It is the ultimate aim of this work to

lay bare the economic law of motion
of modern society." (Preface to CAP-
ITAL)

The historical and logical in CAPITAL are not two separate

movements: the dialectic contains them both. It is not that Marx
has interrelated them. It is the very nature and life of the one to
contain the other. What Marx has as his underlying assumption
is that history has not discharged theory from the need to transcend
the given society. With Marx, theory is not kept above the earth,
but rather takes its departure from reality, which is also its point
of return. It is the reality out of which the movement comes, and
what Marx does is to see that object and subject are kept as one.
The two together, theory and practice, make up the truth at any
moment. The very first sentence in the chapter which is the climax
to the whole of Volume !-"The General Law of Capitalist Accu-
mulation"-states: "In this chapter we consider the influence of the
growth of capital on the lot of the working class." 9 8 This is not
mere agitation. It can be and is expressed in the most precise
scientific terms yet discovered to discern the law of motion of
capitalist society. "The most important factor in this inquiry,"
Marx's very next sentence reads, "is the composition of capital."
The law of the ever greater growth of machinery at the ex-
pense of the working class, which had heretofore been expressed
as the growth of constant over variable capital, is now, when
viewed as a totality, expressed as the value and technical com-
position of capital, which Marx calls "the organic composition of
capital." That is to say, they are part of the very organism and
can no more be separated, one from the other, than can the head
from the body and still live.
From the very beginning of CAPITAL we learned of the in-
terdependence of use-value. Value, wrote Marx, may be indifferent
to the use-value by which it is borne, but it must be borne by some
use-value. This bodily form assumes added significance in the ques-
65
THE HUMANISM AND DIALECTIC OF CA.PIT AL, VOL. I

tion of accumulation or expanded reproduction: "Surplus value

is convertible into capital solely because the surplus product whose
\ralue it is, already comprises the material elements of new
capital." 99
Capital, which is "value big with value," deepens the contra-
diction between use-value and value. This is so because not only
are the material and value forms of capital in constant conflict,
but so are the class relations which "interfere with" the production
process. Capital is not a thing but a relation of production estab-
lished by the instrumentality of things. Expanded production
further aggravates this class relationship which is produced and
reproduced by capitalist production. Capitalist private property
"'turns out to be the right on the part of the capitalist to appro-
priate unpaid labor of others or its product, and to be the impossi-
bility, on the part of the laborer, of appropriating his own
product." 100
Out of the innermost needs of capitalist production, whose
motive force is the production of surplus value, comes the drive
to pay the laborer the minimum and to extract from him the maxi-
mum. The class struggle produced thereby leads, under certain cir-
cumstances, to a rise in wages. But that rise is never so high as to
threaten the foundations of capitalist production. The law o[
value, dominating over this mode of production, leads, on the one
hand, to the centralization of the means of production and, on the
other hand, to the socialization of labor.
Capitalism develops according to these two fundamental law~:
the law of centralization of capital, and the law of the socialization
of labor. "One capitalist always kills many," writes Marx, adding
that, "hand in hand with this centralization, or this expropriation
of many capitalists by a few, develop, on an ever-extending scale,
the cooperative form of the labor-process, the conscious technical
application of science, the methodical cultivation of the soil, the
transformation of the instruments of labor into instruments of
labor only usable in common, the economizing of all means of
production by their use as the means of production of combined
socialized labor, the entanglement of all peoples in the net of the
world-market, and this, the international character of the capitalist
regime." 101
66
 MARXISM AND FREEDOM

Note the phrase "the cooperative form of the labor process."

Marx has his eyes fixed on what is happening in production, the
law of the socialization of labor. Every stage in this process of
development of cooperative, socialized labor increases its numbers,
unites it, disciplines it, organizes it. When Ford builds the River
Rouge plant, needing some 60,000 workers, he has thereby-by
the very fact that they work together in one large production unit-
organized those 60,000 into a social force. There were no Rouge
plants in Marx's day, but, in the workers, trained to cooperative
labor by the organization of large-scale production, he saw that
capitalism itself "produces its own grave-diggers."
Others, besides Marx, had noticed the cooperative form of
labor, and they believed that higher and higher standards of living,
more and more democracy, more and more equality would be the
consequence. Marx laughed them to scorn. He insisted that it was
the workers who were being trained to cooperation. It was the
cooperative form of the labor process which grew continually. The
more the workers were knit into huge cooperative units, the more
capital had to attack and suppress them. Instead of a continuous
growth of equality and democracy, you would have such class strug-
gles as the world had never seen before, and a growing and un-
ceasing revolt of the workers. Here are his own words:
"Along with the constantly diminishing number of the mag-
nates of capital who usurp and monopolize all advantages of this
process of transformation, grows the mass of misery, oppression,
slavery, degradation, exploitation, but with this too grows the
revolt of the working class, a class always increasing in numbers and
disciplined, united, organized by the very mechanism of the
process of production itself." 1 0 2
Marx wrote this in 1867, ninety years ago. Since that time,
the unity, discipline and organiiation of the working class has
grown until today it is the most powerful social class the world
has ever seen. As centralization has increased and the number of
capitalist magnates diminished, so of necessity has the labor bureau•
cracy grown. For the magnates by themselves are too few to disci-
pline tens• of' millions of workers. This bureaucracy is their weapon
against the cooperative society. Every worker in large-scale indus-
try recognizes that today; hence the wildcats.
67
THE HUMANISM AND DIALECTIC OF CAPITAL, VOL. I

The foreman does not tell the worker how to do his work.
Neither does the committeeman. They are there to discipline the
worker. Every day that becomes harder to do. Hence, more bureau-
cracy, more supervision, more time-study men, more negotiations,
more "fact-finders." The ultimate end of all this is what there
is in Russia, the completely bureaucratized State of totalitarianism
with its slave labor camps. It is the final centralization within a
single country. The relations of production in any society de-
termine, shape, put their stamp upon all other relations. As pro-
duction expands and is bureaucratized, so is it with all other
spheres of social activity. All this bureaucratism, ending in the
One-Party State, is rooted in the need to discipline workers in
production.
Marx foresaw this trend because he carried through to the
logical conclusion all the laws of capitalist development. He
showed first how the centralization of the means of production
ends in trustification and, ultimately, in statification. Whether
this ultimate development of the centralization of capital would
be accompanied by "the violent means of annexation" or the
"smooth road of forming stock companies"-the results are the
same: "With the advance of accumulation; therefore, the propor-
tion of constant to variable capital changes. If it was originally,
say, l: l, it now becomes successively 2: I, 3: I, 4: I, 5: I, 7: l, etc.,
so that, as the capital increases, instead of Y2 of its total value,
only 1/3, 1/4, 1/5, 1/7, etc., is transformed into labor power and,
on the other hand, 2/3, 3/4, 4/5, 5/6, 7/8 into means of produc-
tion."103
The end result of this relationship of capital to the lot of the
working class is the great, the insoluble contradiction which is
wrecking the entire system-the unemployed army. Marx calls this
"the absolute general law of capitalist accumulation." The greater
the use of machinery, or constant capital, the lesser relatively the
need for variable or living labor power. There may now be 30
million workers where formerly there were half as many, but the
investment of capital is sevenfold. And with it will always come
unemployment. Thus, on the one hand, capitalism keeps repro-
ducing the wage laborer; on the other hand; he throws him into
unemployment.
68
 MARXISM AND FREEDOM

This failure to give "full employment" to labor shakes the

whole structure of capitalist society. Marx emphasizes that "every
special historic mode of production has its own special laws of
population, historically valid within its limits alone." 104 For cap-
italist production, as we saw, that law is the law of the surplus
army, surplus, that is to the capitalist mode of production.
The incapacity of capitalism to reproduce its own value-
creating substance-labor power in the shape of the living, em-
ployed laborer-signals the doom of capitalism. Marx defines this
doom in the final part-Part VIII1° 5 -where he deals with the his-
torical genesis and then with the historical tendency of capitalistic
accumulation.
The historic beginnings of capitalism, described under "The
So-Called Primitive Accumulation of Capital," has, as we saw,
highly-charged agitation material. The fact that Marx relegates
this material to the end, instead of the beginning of CAPITAL,
cannot be overestimated. It means that Marx wished, above all,
to analyze the law of development of capitalism. For, no matter
what its beginnings were, the contradictions arise not from its
origin but from its inherent nature, which "begets with the inex-
orability of a law of Nature, its own negation." 106
The law of motion of capitalistic society is therefore the law
of its collapse. Marx discerned this law through the application
of dialectical materialism to the developmental laws of capitalist
production.
"All means for the development of production transform
themselves into means of domination over, and exploitation of, the
producers; they mutilate the laborer into a fragment of a man,
degrade him to the level of an appendage of a machine, destroy
every remnant of charm in his work and turn it into a hated
toil; they estrange from him the intellectual potentialities of the
labor process in the same proportion as science is incorporated in
it as an independent power, they distort the conditions under which
he works, subject him during the labor process to a despotism the
more hateful for its meanness; they transform his life-time into
workingtime, and drag his wife and child beneath the wheels of
the .Juggernaut of capital."101
69
THE HUMANISM AND DIALECTIC OF CAP IT AL, VOL. I

How many have, at this point, stopped and bemoaned that

nevertheless the worker is out only for higher wages, and that once
he gets it, he is satisfied "because he is better off." Marx says the
exact opposite. As he continues, Marx stresses that whether "his
payment is high or low" his lot is worse:
"It follows therefore that in proportion as capital is accumu-
lated, the lot of the laborer, be his payment high or low, must
grow worse. The law, finally, that always equilibrates the relative
surplus population, or industrial reserve army, to the extent and
energy of accumulation, this law rivets the laborer to capital more
firmly than the sledges of Vulcan did Prometheus to the rock. It
establishes an accumulation of misery, corresponding with accu-
mulation of capital. Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, there-
fore, at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil,
slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite
pole, i.e., on the side of the class that produces its own product
in the form of capital."los
"Centralization of the means of production and socialization
of labor at last reach a point where they become incompatible with
their capitalist integument. The integument is burst asunder. The
knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are
expropriated." 109
The positive side of all this is that "it brings forth the m<t-
terial agencies for its own dissolution. From that moment new
forces and new passions spring up in the bosom of society; but the
old social organization fetters them and keeps them down. It must
be annihilated. It is annihilated." 11 0
Thus the development of capitalism itself creates the basis
of a new Humanism-the "new forces and new passions" which
will reconstruct society on new, truly human beginnings, "a society
in which the full and free development of every individual is the
ruling principle." 111 It is because Marx based himself on this
Humanism, more popularly called "the inevitability of socialism,"
that he could discern the law of motion of capitalist society, the
inevitability of its collapse. The Humanism of CAPITAL runs
like a red thread throughout the work. This gives it both its pro-
fundity and its force and direction.
70
 CHAPTER EIGHT

THE LOGIC AND SCOPE OF CAPIT AL,

VOLUMES II AND III

"All science would be superfluous if

the appearance, the form and the nature
of things were wholly indentical." (CAP-
ITAL, Vol. Ill).

Political economy has produced two theories between which

it oscillated: (1) that production creates its own market; and
(2) that it is impossible for the worker "to buy back" the products
he himself produced. Marx's great contribution consisted in dia-
lectically combining these. The dominant feature remained the fact
that production did create its own market. But this did not
negate the existence of under-consumption. It merely showed
that within capitalistic production there resides a disregard for the
limits of consumption.
The outstanding characteristic of Volume II, whose subject
is the process of circulation, is its demonstration that "realizing
surplus value," that is, selling, is not the problem. The significance
of the first two parts dealing with the metamorphoses and turnover
of capital lies in the analysis that the very continuity of the process
of circulation involves the sphere of reproduction. Thus, even
when Marx's point of departure is the market, reproduction is of
the essence.
Reproduction, he states, must be posed "in its fundamental
simplicity," that is to say, it is necessary not to get lost in "a vicious
circle of prerequisites"-of constantly going to market with the
products produced and returning from market with commodities
bought.

71
THE LOGIC AND SCOPE OF CAPITAL

1) The Two Departments of Social Production: Means of Pro-

duction and Means of Consumption

To cut through the tangle of markets, Marx divides the entire

social product into two, and only two, main departments: De-
partment I produces means of production, and Department II
produces means of consumption. 11 3 The division is symptomatic
of the class division in society. Marx categorically refused to divide
social production into more than two departments, for example,
a third department for the production of gold, although gold is
neither a means of production nor a means of consumption, but
rather a means of circulation. That is an entirely subordinate
question, however, to the basic postulate of a closed society in
which there are only two classes and hence only two decisive
divisions of social production. It is the premise that decides the
boundaries of the problem. The relationship between the two
branches is not merely a technical one. It is rooted in the class
relationship between the worker and the capitalist~
Surplus value is not some disembodied spirit floating between
heaven and earth, but is embodied within means of production
and within means of consumption. To try to separate surplus
value from means of production and from means of consumption
is to fall into the petty-bourgeois quagmire of underconsumption-
ism. It is impossible to have the slightest comprehension of the
economic laws of capitalistic production without being oppres-
sively aware of the role of the material form of constant capital.
The material elements of simple production and reproduction--
labor power, raw materials and means of production-are the ele-
ments of expanded reproduction. In order to produce ever greater
quantities of products, more means of production are necessary.
That, and not the "market," is the differentia specifica of expanded
reproduction. ·
Marx established that the social product cannot be ''either"
means of production "or" means of consumption. There is a pre-
ponderance of means of production over means of consumption.
Marx's point here is that the bodily form of value predetermines
the destination of commodities: iron is not consumed by people
72
 MARXISM AND FREEDOM

but by steel; sugar is not consumed by machines but by people.

Value may be indifferent to the useful form which holds it, but it
must be incorporated in some use-value to be realized. Just because
the capitalist is only interested in surplus value (profit) doesn't
mean that he can disembody it from the article in which it is
embodied.
The division of the whole product into but two departments i'i
not a hypothesis. It is a fact. It not only is so. It must be so, for
the use-values produced are not those used by workers, nor even
by capitalists, but by capital. We can see this most clearly in this
country, for example, where ninety per cent of pig iron is "con-
sumed" by the companies which produce it; fifty per cent of the
"market" for the products of the steel industry is the transporta-
tion industry. Where all utilitarian economists were floundering
in talking of use-values because they were talking of articles for
consumption, Marx shows that the use-value of the means of pro-
duction shows how important is "the determination of use-value
in the determination of economic orders." 114 Under capitalism,
the means of production form the greater part of the two depart-
ments of social production and, therefore, also of the "market."
That is what Marx called "the real being of capital," and that is
why the market was not the problem.
The consumption market is limited to the luxuries of the
capitalists, and the needs of the workers, paid at value. It cannot
be larger. The only market that can expand beyond the limits
of the workers paid at value is the capital goods market. Means
of production literally shoot up to the sky. To illustrate this for
both simple and expanded reproduction, Marx devised his famous
formulas which show constant capital to be greater than variable
capital and surplus value.
To understand the formulas one must comprehend the premise
upon which they are built: a closed capitalist society, that is, an
isolated society dominated by the law of value. For Marx, the
fundamental conflict in a capitalist society is that between capital
and labor; all other elements are subordinate. If this is so in life,
then the first necessity in theory is to pose the problem as one
between the capitalist and the worker, purely and simply. Hence,
the assumption of a society consisting only of workers and cap-
73
THE LOGIC AND SCOPE OF CAPITAL

italists. Hence, the exclusion of ··•third groups" and, as he states

repeatedly, the exclusion of foreign trade as having nothing to do
fundamentally with the conflict between the worker and the cap-
italist.
A capitalist society is distinguished from all previous socie-
ties by being a value-producing society. The law of value has
nothing in common with the fact that in other class societies the
worker was paid his means of subsistence. Under capitalism the
thirst for unpaid hours of labor comes from the very nature of pro-
duction and is not limited by the gluttony of the master. Value,
the socially necessary labor time needed to produce commodities,
is constantly changing due to the unceasing technological revolu-
tions in production. This is a never-ending source of disturbance
in the conditions of production as well as in the social relations,
and distinguishes capitalism from all other modes of production.
Marx's isolated capitalist society is dominated by this law of value,
and Marx does not let us forget that this law is a law of the
world market. "The industrialist always has the world market be-
fore him, compares and must continually compare his cost prices
with those of the whole world, and not only with those of his
home market."115
Thus, while Marx excludes foreign trade, he nevertheless
places his society in the environment of the world market. These
are the conditions of the problem.
Marx's formulas were designed to serve two purposes: (I) on
the one hand, he wished to expose the "incredible aberration" of
Adam Smith, who "spirited away" the constant portion of capital
by asserting that "in the final analysis" it dissolved itself into
wages; (2) on the other hand, Marx wanted to answer the under-
consumptionist argument that continued capital accumulation
was impossible because of inability to sell, that is, because of
"overproduction."
Smith's "fundamentally perverted analysis" 1 rn became part of
the dogma of political economy because it dovetailed with the class
interests of the capitalists to have that error retained. If, as Smith
maintained, the constant portion of capital "in the final analysis"
dissolved itself into wages, then the workers need not struggle
against a "temporary" appropriation of the unpaid hours of la-
74
 MARXISM AND FREEDOM

lbor. They need merely wait for the product of their labor to "dis-
!Solve" itself into wages. Marx proved the contrary to be true.
Not only did the constant portion of capital not "dissolve" itself
iinto wages, but it became the very instrumentality through which
the capitalist gained the mastery over the living worker. Utopian
socialists who didn't grasp this freed themselves of the actualities
of the class struggle.
Each of the two departments of social production comprises
three elements: (1) constant capital; (2) variable capital; and (3)
surplus value. Just as the division of social production into two
main departments was not merely technical, so this was not a merely
technical division. It was rooted in the relationship of worker to
capitalist, and was inseparable from the inherent laws of capitalist
production. '''It is purely a tautology to say that crises are caused
by the scarcity of solvent consumers, or of a paying consumption.
The capitalist system does not know any other modes of con-
·sumption but a paying one, except that of the pauper or of the
'thief'. . . . But if one were to attempt to clothe this tautology
with a semblance of profounder justification by saying that the
working class received too small a portion of their own product,
and the evil would be remedied by giving them a larger share of
it, or raising their wages, we should reply that crises are pre-
cisely always preceded by a period in which wages rise generally
and the working class actually get a larger share of the annual
product intended for consumption. From the point of view of the
advocates of 'simple' (I) common sense, such a period should
rather remove a crisis."117
Marx spent a seemingly interminable time in exposing the
error of Smith. This was so because this was the great divide
not alone between bourgeois economics and Marxism, but also
between petty-bourgeois criticism, orutopian socialism, and scien-
tific socialism. There is not the wealth of statistical and historical
material in Volume II, which Marx did not live to complete for
publication, that there is in Volume I, which he prepared for the
printer himself. This has given rise to as many misrepresentations
among Marxists as among anti-Marxists. The chief objection is
directed against Marx's thesis that production creates its own mar-
ket. The objectors say that this implies a "balance" between pro-
75
THE LOGIC AND SCOPE OF CAPITAL

duction and consumption. The truth is that the proportional

relationship between Departments I and II, in the Marxian for-
mula, means the exact opposite. Marx based himself on the laws
of accumulation which he analyzed in Volume I when he showed
that constant capital keeps on expanding. The exact relationship
to variable capital that he gives it is seven to one. It should there-
fore have been clear that the "balance" that exists in the formulas--
which were built on the most extreme assumptions of "an isolated
nation" with no foreign trade, nor with the ordinary headaches of
sales-exists solely because of the production relations under cap-
italism which resulted in this fantastic proportion of seven to one.
That is why Marx's categories are so immutable for capitalism
and apply to no other society. They assume that what is produced
is consumed because it is capitalist production, and capitalist pro-
duction is the production of capital and hence is consumed by
capital. Marx built his theory of capitalist breakdown on this. To
deduce from the formulas that there was "no disproportion" in an
ideal capitalism with no market troubles, is enough to make Marx.
turn in his grave.
What Marx did, in disproving the underconsumption theory
was to demonstrate that there is no direct connection between
production. and consumption. As Lenin phrased it, in the most
profound analysis that Volume II ever received: "The difference
in view of the petty-bourgeois economists from the views of Marx
does not consist in the fact that the first realize in general the
connection between production and consumption in capitalist so-
ciety, and the second do not. (This would be absurd.) The dis-
tinction consists in this, that the petty-bourgeois economists con-
sidered this tie between production and consumption to be a
direct one, thought that production follows consumption. Marx
shows that the connection is only an indirect one, that it is con-
nected only in the final instance, because in capitalist society
consumption follows production."llB
The preponderance of production over consumption was.
considered to mean the "automatic" collapse of capitalist society.
Where the classicists saw only the tendency toward equilibrium.
the petty-bourgeois critics saw only the tendency away from equi-
librium. Marx demonstrated that both tendencies were there, in-
76
 MARXISM AND FREEDOM

extricably connected. Volume II is both a critique of bourgeois and

petty-bourgeois thought, and an analysis of the actual movement
of capitalist production. As Trotsky put it, when Stalin sud-
denly "discovered" that the formulas also "apply to a socialist
society," "Marx's formulas," Trotsky wrote, "deal with a chemically
pure capitalism which never existed and does not exist anywhere
now. Precisely because of this, they revealed the basic tendency
of every capitalism but precisely of capitalism and only of cap-
italism."

2) Appearance and Reality

Volume II of CAPITAL was published posthumously, in 1885,
by Marx's lifelong collaborator, Frederick Engels. This posthumous
publication hit a blank wall in the Second International. It seemed
to pass by both the reformists and the revolutionaries within the
International. In fact, the greatest revision came from the revolu-
tionary martyr, Rosa Luxemburg. As for Karl Kautsky, the the-
oretical leader of the Second International, he wrote sophomoric
essays on Volume II. The sole exception to this common obtuse-
ness was Lenin. It was not because Lenin was "smarter" than Kaut-
sky that he knew how "to apply" the concepts Marx developed in
Volume II to the actual development of the Russian economy.
In Russia, the question whether capitalism could develop without
foreign markets was not the theoretical question it was in Ger-
many, where imperialist expansion was conquering new markets
daily. In backward Russia, which could not successfully compete
for the world market, there arose a whole school of theoreticians,
the Narodniki (Populists) who maintained that "since" capitalism
could not exist without a market, and "since" Russia had come
too late on the historic scene to secure one, Russia could "there-
fore" skip capitalism and go directly from the mir (peasant com-
mune) to communism. Lenin hit out against them theoretically
and practically. He combined both attacks in a most profound
study of The Development of Capitalism in Russia. It cleared the
ground for Marxism.
The main burden of Luxemburg's critique of Marx's theory
of accumulation was directed against his assumption of a closed
77
THE LOGIC AND SCOPE OF CA PIT AL

capitalist society. She gave this assumption a twofold meaning:

(I) a society composed solely of workers and capitalists; and (2)
"the rule of capitalism in the entire world."
Marx, however, did not pose the rule of capital in the entire
world, but its rule in a single isolated nation. When Luxemburg's
critics 119 pointed this out to her, she poured vitriolic scorn upon
them. To speak of a single capitalist society, wrote Luxemburg in
her Anticritique, 120 was a "fantastic absurdity" characteristic of the
"crassest epigonism." Marx, she insisted, could have had no such
stratospheric conception in mind. Nevertheless, as Bukharin pointed
out, Luxemburg was not only misinterpreting Marx's concept, but
misreading the simple fact, which Marx had most clearly put on
paper: "In order to simplify the question (of expanded reproduc-
tion) we abstract foreign trade and examine an isolated nation." 121
Rosa Luxemburg falsely counterposed reality to theory. She
argued that a "precise demonstration" from history would show
that expanded reproduction has never taken place in a "closed
society," i.e., in isolation from the world market, but rather through
distribution to, and expropriation of "non-capitalistic strata and
non-capitalist societies." Her critique flowed theoretically from this
one fundamental error of falsely counterposing reality to theory.
She was betrayed by the powerful historical development of im-
perialism that was taking place, to substitute the relationship
of capitalism to non-capitalism for the relationship of capital
to labor. This led her to deny Marx's assumption of a closed
society. Once she had given up this basic premise of the whole of
Marxist theory, there was no place for her to go but to the
sphere of exchange and consumption.
This is most clearly revealed by Luxemburg herself. Some of
her best writing in Accumulation, occurs where she describes
the "real" process of accumulation through the conquest of Algeria,
India, the Anglo-Boer war, the carving up of Africa, the opium
wars against China, the extermination of the American Indian, the
growing trade with non-capitalist societies, and her analysis of
protective tariff and militarism. Marx gave at least as graphic a
description of primitive accumulation as Rosa did of imperialist
exploitation of backward lands. Though "capital comes dripping
from hand to foot, from every pore with blood and dirt," never-
78
 MARXISM AND FREEDOM

theless, primitive accumulation created only the conditions for real

capitalism. It now had a certain accumulation of capital, property-
less workers, and a lot of subordination of labor to capital. How-
ever, it still remained merely "formal." As Marx put it, so long as
"variable capital preponderated greatly over constant," there was
"as yet no specific capitalist character."122
Luxemburg denied that this preponderance of constant over
variable capital was inherently capitalistic. To her it was merely
"capitalistic language" for the essential elements of production
in any society. She offered to demonstrate this by taking up the
relations of capitalism to non-capitalist lands. She began by sup-
plementing CAPITAL. She ended by revising it.
Where Luxemburg maintained that Marx's formulas of ex-
panded reproduction were incorrect in theory and did not cor-
respond to real life in any one living nation, Lenin said they held
in life and were correct in theory. Russia, even as America, however,
seems to have the perfect soil for all sorts of theories of "excep-
tionalism" from '''skipping capitalism" to having "communism"
under totalitarianism. When Lenin argued theoretically, his critics
said he didn't know Russia. When he showed from exhaustive
Russian statistics that capitalism was indeed coming to Tsarist
Russia, they said he didn't understand theory. When he both
won on the theoretical front and routed the Narodniki on the
organizational front as well, the ideological children of the N arod-
niki, present-day economists, state that it wasn't, after all, such
a great feat for it was not Marxism but irrefutable economic facts
which won out. Precisely. That is the logic of Volume II.
It is necessary to bear in mind, that the passage, in Volume I
of CAPITAL, which deals with the ultimate development of the
centralization of capital in the hands of a single. capitalist or
single capitalist corporation, did not appear in the early edition
of the work. He added this passage only after the Paris Commune,
which was the period when he discussed with Engels the con-
centration of all capital in the hands of the State. 12a Volume I,
on which Marx never stopped working until the day of his death
in 1883, is the one complete volume we have from his own hand.
In a note to the French edition, and in all subsequent edition-;.
incorporating these changes, he asked the readers to acquaint
79
THE LOGIC AND SCOPE OF CAPIT AL

themselves with these additions because they "possessed scientific

value independent of the original." 1 24
Because our epoch has had concretely to face the problems
posed only theoretically by Marx, we can see the reason why
Marx built Volume II on what, in the I870's was certainly a non-
existent, fantastic society. Under such a society, he was saying,
we would expect to see the following:
(l) The worker will be paid at value. Well-intentioned plan-
·ners may, during the Depression, have wondered whether it
wouldn't be possible to raise the standard of living of the workers
-not of some Stakhanovites, but of the working class as a whole
-if all capital were concentrated in the hands of the State and
thus easily planned. But Russian totalitarianism is with us to
puncture that grand illusion. For, the moment that working
standards are raised, the cost of production of a commodity goes
up above the cost of the surrounding world market and then the
production inside the country is undersold by the product from
a value-producting society, which means that the society cannot
indefinitely continue. The jet plane would cost so much more to
build that the competing countries on the world market would
be able to defeat the particular country in the present form of
capitalist competition, which is total war. It is not a question
of simple competition or sale. 12 5 If the United States has the
H-bomb and atomic energy and Automation, Russia had better
discover them too, or be destroyed. She discovered these soon
enough.
(2) The means of production will far outdistance the meam
of consumption. Because value production automatically limits
the consumption goods of a community to the luxuries of the
capitalist class plus the amount which the worker can buy when
paid at value, and because the material form of production the
world over shows that means of production outdistance means of
consumption, Marx assumed the capitalist world as "one nation."
It will be impossible, over a historic period, to avoid unemploy-
ment because the society will be straining every nerve to bring
its plants to the level of the more advanced productive system.
The only way "to stay in the race" is to pay the worker as little
as possible and to have him produce as much as possible.
80
 MARXISM AND FREEDOM

The fundamental error of those who cannot understand that

a single capitalist society is governed by the same laws as a society
composed of individual capitalists is that they simply will not
understand that what happens in the market is merely the result
and the consequence of the inherent difficulties in the process
of production itself. Where Marx kept us in the process of pro·
duction throughout Volume I, and there reached the ultimate
limit of capitalist development into a closed, single capitalist
company controlling everything, they seem to think that a single
capitalist society will have a limitless market. The single capitalist
-call him "Collective Leadership under Khrushchev, Inc.," if you
will-will have, at a certain stage, a magnificent plant, completely
automatized, or a jet bomber, but he cannot stop to raise the
standard of the masses of workers. He may be able to avoid the
more extreme forms of ordinary commercial crises, but even within
the community itself he cannot escape the internal crisis of pro-
duction. The Plan at no stage can stop to improve the conditions
of the masses. Capital does not allow it. That is why Marx,
throughout CAPITAL, insists that either you have the self-activity
of the workers, the plan of freely associated labor, or you have
the hierarchic structure of relations in the factory and the despotic
Plan. There is no in-between.
The only possibility of avoiding capitalist crises is the abroga-
tion of the law of value. That is to say, planning must be done
according to the needs of the productive system as a human system.
A system where human needs are not governed by the necessity to
pay the laborer at minimum and to extract the maximum abstract
labor for the purpose of keeping the productive system, as far as
possible, within the lawless laws of the world market, dominated
by the law of value.
It may seem that all this would not apply to a capitalist
society of a "really" advanced stage of development, like the
United States. If, for the sake of argument, we were to imagine
the United States becoming a single capitalist society, even this,
far from improving the conditions of the workers, would worsen
them. It would then be a given capitalist society, which means
the rest of the world market would exist. Thereupon, Europe
and the Far East would probably combine against it, and the
81
THE LOGIC AND SCOPE OF CA.PITAL

struggle for the capitalist world market would result in a war

which would either end in (1) a single capitalist state; (2) so-
cialism; or (3) the destruction of civilization altogether. Back-
ward country or advanced, the absolute law of capitalism, as an-
alyzed by :Marx, would hold good even if all capital were con-
centrated in the hands of one single capitalist or one single cap-
italist corporation. What to Marx was theory is a most concrete
problem now. Russia is proof of the fact that the logic and scope
of Marxian theory are as integrally connected as are appearance
and reality in life.
The "mystic" Hegel saw clearer the relationship of the dia-
lectic to life than our present pragmatists who laugh at the dia-
lectic and meet each fact of life as an "unforeseen" phenomenon.
"Wherever there is movement, wherever there is life, wherever
anything is carried into effect in the practical world, there Dialectic
is at work. It is also the soul of all knowledge which is truly
scientific." 126

3) The Breakdown of Capitalism: Crises, Human F1·eedom, and

Volume III of CAPITAL
"At last we have arrived at the forms of
appearance which serve as the starting
point in the vulgar conception: ground
rent, coming from the earth, profit (in-
terest) from capital, wages from la-
bor. . . . Finally, since these three
(wages, ground rent, profit (interest))
constitute the respective sources of in-
come of the three classes of landowners,
capitalists, and wage laborers, we have
in conclusion the class struggle, into
which the movement of the whole
Scheisse is resolved."-Marx to Engels1 2 7

Marxist textbooks, for generations, have repeated the follow-

ing truisms: (l) Capitalism is a form of society in which the
means of production and the land are the private property of the
82
 MARXISM AND FREEDOM

capitalists. (2) The worker is compelled to sell his labor power

at the cost of his production and reproduction in order to be able
to live. (3) The motive force of this mode of production is the
desire of the capitalist for profit. This profit is gained in the
following manner: capitalist production produces commodities;
commodities are sold for money. The money contains what the
capitalist spent plus a surplus, part of which is his profit.
In order that the society may be looked upon as capitalist,
it seems essential to have this process of money in the pocket of
the private capitalist; the buying of labor power and means of
production; the production of commodities; the selling of the-
commodities on the market for more money; etc. All this is true,
but it is not the whole truth. Marx did not have to spend forty
years to prove that.
Marx's primary theory is a theory of what he first called
"alienated labor" and then "abstract" or "value-producing" la-
bor. He analyzed commodities and showed that the exchange of
commodities is an exchange of certain quantities of labor. Com-
modities in general had been exchanged more or less sporadically
for centuries before capitalism. Capitalism begins when the capacity
to labor becomes a commodity. As we saw in Volume I, produc-
tion becomes capitalist commodity production from the moment
when the direct producer must "instead of a commodity, sell his
own capacity to labor, as a commodity.'' 12 8 Hence, it is more cor-
rect to call the Marxist theory of capital not a labor theory of
value, but a value theory of labor.
Marx repudiated entirely the idea that the sale and purchase
of labor power is the essential mark of capitalist society. In Vol-
ume I he showed how this pertained only on the surface; that
it was only "an apparent exchange. . . . The relation of exchange
subsisting between the capitalist and the laborer becomes a mere
semblance pertaining to the circulation, a mere form, foreign
to the real nature of the transaction and only to mystify it. The
ever-repeated purchase and sale of labor power is now mere form;
what really takes place is this-the capitalist again and again ap-
propriates without equivalent, a portion of the previously ma-
terialized labor of others and exchanges it for a greater quantity
of living labor.''129
83
THE LOGIC AND SCOPE OF CAPITA.L

In Volume II, he wrote: "The peculiar characteristic is not

that the commodity, labor power, is saleable, but that labor power
appears in the shape of a commodity." This perversity is due to
the perverse nature of capitalism where dead labor dominates
over living labor and where relations between men appear as if
they were relations between things: "It is, however, quite char-
acteristic of the bourgeois horizon, which is entirely bounded by
the craze for making money, not to see in the character of the
mode of production the basis of the corresponding mode of cir-
culation, but vice versa.''.180
In Volume III he stated: "The way in which surplus value is
transformed into profit via the rate of profit is but a continued
development of the perversion of subject and object taking place
in the process of production.''181
And again: "We have the complete mystification of the cap-
italist mode of production, the transformation of social condi-
tions into things, the indiscriminate amalgamation of the ma-
terial conditions of production with their historical and social
forms. It is an enchanted, perverted, topsy-turvy world, in which
Mister Capital and Mistress Land carry on their goblin tricks as
social characters and at the same time as mere things.''182
Indeed he says these same things in a thousand different ways
throughout his work. That is the content and form, the essence
and the absolute of the whole analysis.
It is obvious from the very nomenclature that the primary
feature of commodities in general is that they are sold on the
market. It should be equally obvious that the fundamental feature
of labor power as a commodity is not that it is bought or sold on
the market, but the specific function it performs in the process of
production, where it is "a source not only of value, but of more
value than it has itself." This is the issue. This is the hub around
which all Marxist economic theory-"production" (Volume I),
"circulation" (Volume II), and "forms of the process as a whole"
(Volume III)-revolves.
Marx develops his analysis of capitalism on different levels
of abstraction and each level has its own dialectic. In Volume I,
the categories which enabled us to comprehend the realities of
production were: constant and variable capital (labor power).
84
 MARXISM AND FREEDOM

In Volume II, where we are on the surface of society, the cate-

gories which disclose the inner mechanism are: means of produc-
tion and means of consumption. In Volume III, it is the decline
in the rate of profit, "the general contradiction of capitalistic pro-
duction that reveals its law of motion and points to its collapse."
It took the crash of 1929 to open the skulls of the academic
economists to Marx's analysis of the breakdown of capitalism.
It then became a popular pastime to say that if Marx had only
shed his "Hegelianism," taken off the "mysticism" with which he
enveloped the concept of value, and begun instead with Volume
III where he deals with "real life," that is to say the surface phenom-
ena of competition, profit, rent, etc., his "prophecies" of Big Busi-
ness and cyclical crises would have been easy to see and they would
have learned "much" from him. Marx dealt with that type of argu-
mentation a half century before. That is why he pointed out that:
"The annual process of reproduction is easily understood so long
as we keep in view merely the sum total of the year's production.
But every single component of this product must be brought into
the market as a commodity, and there the difficulty begins. The
movement of the individual capital, and of the personal revenue,
cross and intermingle and are lost in the general change of places,
in the circulation of wealth and society; this dazes the sight and
propounds very complicated problems for solution." 133 He not
only pointed to the difficulty. We find that he warned against
the easy way out, such as beginning with the surface phenomena
of profit rather than the production reality of surplus value:
"We shall show in Book III that the rate of profit is no mystery
so soon as we know the laws of surplus value. If we reverse the
process we cannot comprehend either the one or the other." 134
The third volume, which presumably best meets the taste
of the academic economists, analyzed life in the capitalist market
as it really is. We learn that commodities sell, not at value, but
at price of production; that surplus value is not an abstraction,
congealed unpaid labor, but that its real form is threefold: (1)
profit for the industrialist; (2) rent for the landlord; and (3) in-
terest for the banker; that capital is not only a social relation of
production, but that it has a bodily form of money-capital. Here

R5
THE LOGIC AND SCOPE OF CAP IT AL

we study the role of credit and even get some glimpses into
swindling.
And what is the grand result of learning all the facts of life?
How have they changed the laws that arise from the strict process
of production which the academic economists call "abstract"?
Not at all. Not at all. At the end of all these intricate transforma-
tions of surplus value into ground rent, interest and profit, as
well as the conversion of values into prices, rate of surplus value
into rate of profit, etc.-at the end of it all, Marx takes us back
to that on which it is based: production of value and surplus
value. He shows us that in the final analysis the sum of all prices is
equal to the sum of all values. Where the worker has created
nothing, the capitalist manipulator can get nothing. Profit, even as
surplus value, comes not from "ownership" but from production.
To get at the real cause of crises Marx makes an abstraction
of "the bogus transactions and speculations which the credit sys-
tem favors." 135
Nothing fundamental has changed; nothing whatever. Labor
power, which is the supreme commodity of capitalist production
because it alone creates capital, is still a commodity, sold at value,
and-still in the process of production and not in the process of
exchange or the market-creates a greater value than it itself is.
Note the far-reaching insight of Marx into the doom of value
production out of its own inherent laws of development: "In order
to produce the same rate of profit, when the constant capital set
in motion by one laborer increases ten-fold, the surplus labor
time would have to increase ten-fold, and soon the total labor
time, and finally the fully twenty-four hours a day would not suf-
fice, even if wholly appropriated by capital.'' (Vol. III, p. 468)
Even the concept of a single capitalist society pales before
the concept of appropriating the value of "fully twenty-four hours
a day." Marx makes this extreme assumption because in no other
way can he express the fundamental movement. What Marx is
saying is that even if the worker learned to live on air and could
work all twenty-four hours a day, this ever-expanding monster of
machine production could not keep on expanding without collaps·
ing, since living labor is the only source of this value and surplus
value. Since that is exactly what is constantly being cut relatively
86
 MARXISM AND FREEDOM

to the ever greater machines that are being made and used, there
just wouldn't be sufficient surplus value to keep the thing going.
"The real barrier of capitalist production," Marx concludes,
"is capital itself. It is the fact that capital and its self-expansion
appear as the starting and closing point, as the motive and aim of
production; that production is merely production for capital, and
not vice versa, the means of production mere .means for an ever
expanding system of the life process for the benefit of the society
of producers." 186 In opposition to this he points to the fact that
"the realm of freedom does not commence until the point is
passed where labor under the compulsion of necessity and external
utility is required. In the very nature of things it lies beyond the
sphere of material production in the strict meaning of the term." 18 7
The constant revolutions in production, and the constant ex-
pansion of constant capital, writes Marx once again, necessitate,
of course, an extension of the market. But as he has explained
over and over again, both theoretically and practically, the enlarge-
ment of the market in a capitalist nation is limited by the fact that
the worker is paid at value. This is the supreme manifestation
of his simplifying assumption that the worker is paid at value.
In Volume III, we see that this is the innermost cause of crisis-
that in production, not in the market, labor creates a value greater
than it is itself. The worker is a producer of overproduction.
It cannot be otherwise in a value-producing society, where the
means of consumption, being but a moment in the reproduction
of labor power, cannot be bigger than the needs of capital for labor
power. That is the fatal defect of capitalist production. On the
one hand, the capitalist must increase his market. On the other
hand, it cannot be larger.
The crisis that follows is not caused by a shortage in "effective
demand." On the contrary, it is the crisis that causes a shortage in
"effective demand." The worker employed yesterday is unem-
ployed today. A crisis occurs not because there has been a scarcity
of markets. As we saw in theory, and as 1929 showed in practice,
the market is largest just before a crisis. From the capitalist view-
point, however, there is occurring an unsatisfactory distribution
of "income" between recipients of wages and those of surplus
value or profits. The capitalist decreases his investments and the
87
THE LOGIC AND SCOPE OF CA.PITAL

resulting stagnation of production appears as overproduction. Of

course, there is a contradiction between production and consump-
tion. Of course, there is "inability to sell." But the inability to sell
manifests itself as such because of the fundamental antecedent de-
cline in the rate of profit, which has nothing whatever to do with
inability to sell.
Marx considered the theory of the declining rate of profit
to be the "pons asini" of the whole political economy, that which
divides one theoretic system from another. The classical political
economists felt it, but they couldn't understand it, because they
could not conceive that the capitalist system, which they considered
not a historical, transitory system, but a permanent one, had some-
thing in its vitals that would doom it. When Marx showed that
decline in the rate of profit was due to the fact of the relative
ever-smaller use of living labor, which is the only source of surplus
value, to ever-greater use of machines, the capitalist pointed in-
stead to the mass of products and hence the mass of profits. They
thought thereby to forget the fall of the rate. Even some Marxists
considered that the tendency for the decline in the rate of profit
had so many counteracting tendencies in the mass of profits from
mass production and in imperialist expansion that it was <:entral
to no one's, not even Lenin's, thinking before 1929. Only then
people began to see that this was not theory but reality. They
then began to look for solutions everywhere except in the reor-
ganization of the process of production itself by the laborer him-
self.
What Marx is describing, in his analysis of what he calls
"the general contradiction of capitalism," is (1) the degradation
of the worker to an appendage of a machine; (2) the constant
growth of the unemployed army; and (3) capitalism's own down-
fall because of its inability to give greater employment to labor.
Since labor power is the supreme commodity of capitalist produc·
tion, the only source of its value and surplus value, capitalism's
inability to reproduce it dooms capitalism itself. As we saw from
the beginning, Marx's critique of capitalist society was based pri-
marily on the perverse, inverted relation of dead to living labor
at the point of production, and extended to the surface of society
where the fetishism of commodities made the relations between
88
 MARXISM AND FREEDOM

people assume "the fantastic form of the relations between things."

Now, in Volume III, he says the very existence of commodities,
and especially of commodities as products of capital, '"implies the
externalization of the conditions of social production and the per-
sonification of the material foundation of production, which char-
acterize the entire capitalist mode of production." Over and over
again, Marx categorically asserts that since all labor under cap-
italism is forced labor, Plan can be nothing but the organization of
production under the domination of the machine. As he told
Proudhon from the first, to try to bring order into the anarchy of
the market of a society based on the factory Plan, could only
mean subjecting society to "one single master." Marx warned
then: not to see the plan inherent in the activity of the revolu-
tionary proletariat must force one to pose an external factor to do
the planning. He dismissed, with great contempt, Proudhon's
Plan to do away with exchange. In "Unravelling the Inner Con-
tradiction," Marx shows that in capitalism's "disorder is its order."
Proudhon was neither the first nor the last of the Planners,
as our age knows much better than Marx's. Planning is not limited
to idealists. The abstract materialist who views technological de-
velopment outside of the class relationship also slips back into
considering the capitalistic factors of production as mere factors
of any social form of production. That is why Marx created new
categories to describe the manner in ufhich machines and labor
unite under a capitalistic economy. Marx developed his analysis
of capitalist production in opposition to all Planners-abstract ma-
terialist as well as idealist.
In Volume I of CAPITAL, the nature of the cooperative form
of the labor process is held out in sharp contrast to the hierarchic
structure of capitalist control. In Volume II, Marx isolates the
capitalist nation and analyses it as a unit: " .•. we must not
follow the manner copied by Proudhon from bourgeois economics,
which looks upon this matter as though a society with a capitalist
mode of production would lose its specific historical and economic
characteristics by being taken as a unit. Not at all. We have in
that case to deal with the aggregate capitalist.'' 13 8
As we saw, the whole of Volume II is built, not on individual,
private capital, but on aggregate, national capital. In Volume III,
89
THE LOGIC AND SCOPE OF CA.PIT AL

Marx returns to the creative plan of the workers as the pian "most
adequate to their human nature and most worthy of it": "Just
as the savage must wrestle with nature in order to satisfy his wants,
in order to maintain his life and reproduce it, so civilized man has
to do it, and he must do it in all forms of society and all possible
modes of production. With his development the realm of natural
necessity expands, because his wants increase; but at the same time
the forces of production increase by which these wants are satis-
fied. The freedom in this field cannot consist of anything else but of
the fact that socialized man, the associated producers, regulate
their interchange with nature rationally, bring it under their
common control, instead of being ruled by it as by some blind
power; that they accomplish their task with the least expenditure
of energy under conditions most adequate to their human nature
and most worthy of it. But it always remains a realm of necessity.
"Beyond it begins that development of human power which
is its own end, the true realm of freedom, which, however, can
flourish only upon the realm of necessity as its basis. The shorten-
ing of the working day is its fundamental premise."139
Thus we see that it isn't only the young Marx but the mature
Marx to whom the creative role of labor is the key to all else.
It isn't only that this creative plan of the workers, in opposition
to the authoritarian Plan of the capitalist, permeates all three vol-
umes of CAPITAL. It is that the actual necessity of revolt will
arise out of the fact that capitalism, as conditions, activity, a11d
purpose, is destroying society. The only force which can overcome
this necessity therefore is a freedom which in itself and for .itself
inseparably combines objective conditions, subjective activity and
purpose. In the Grundrisse Marx said that, once the productive
process "is stripped of its antagonistic form," "the measure of wealth
will then no longer be labor time, but leisure time." 140 The
free time liberated from capitalist exploitation would be for the
free development of the individual's powers. The conception of
freedom that the young Marx had when he broke from bourgeois
society as a revolutionary Hegelian remained with him through-
out his life.
Essentially Marx said what he wanted to say. This is true
not only of Volumes II and Ill, which Engels edited with scrupu-
90
 MARXISM AND FREEDOM

lous care and presented exactly as Marx had written, but even
Book IV, with the structure of which Karl Kautsky did tamper
when he published it as Theories of Surplus Value. The reason
is that Volume I, published by Marx is not only, as he put it, a
whole in itself. It is the whole.
He reorganized 141 the last part, "'Accumulation of Capital,"
in order to show (1) where Volumes II and III (including Theories
of Surplus Value as Book IV of Volume Ill) belong logically: (2)
how they are dialectically connected with Volume I; and (3) what
is the law of motion of capitalism in general and the dialectic
of his analysis in particular. The "Historical Tendency of Cap-
italist Accumulation" thus ends with the two absolute opposites-
capital accumulation and the revolt of the workers headed for
a clash and at the same time going in opposite directions-the
first to its collapse, the second creating "the new passions and
forces" for reconstructing society on new, socialist-humanist be-
ginnings.
There are theoreticians who are willing to say that the analysis
holds for Russia, but not in the exceptional soil of America. If
it wasn't the American frontier that made America different, it
was the American pragmatic character; and if not that, it is that
the American workers "aren't class conscious." Be that as it may,
the economists now do give Marx credit for understanding "his-
tory." Some even admit that economic theory has indeed been
running a losing race with history, except in the case of Marx.
One has even gone so far as to "admire" Marx for his "idea of
theory" and his ability to transform historic narrative into "his-
toric raisonne.'' 14 2 But none have the slightest conception that
Marx's "idea of theory" is as profound as it is only because he had
broken with the bourgeois conception of theory and placed the
worker in the center of all his thinking. There is no other source
for social theory.
It isn't that Marx "glorified" workers. It is that he knew
what is their role in production. Just as history has not discharged
theory from its mission of criticizing existing society, so the workers,
on whose back all the exploitation occurs must-to straighten up
to the height of men-throw all this off their backs and therefore
can criticize it and overcome it and see ahead.
91
THE LOGIC AND SCOPE OF CA.PITAL

It isn't that Marx vilified capitalists and their ideologists.

It is that he knew their role in production and how limited,
therefore, their outlook. Because they were satisfied, they couldn't
grasp all of reality, and therefore their ideology was false.
Marx, when he began, didn't know all the implications of his
materialistic conception of history. Thus, although he saw the
mode of production as determinant for ideology, he thought all
that needs to be done to demonstrate the bankruptcy of bourgeois
thought is to show that the bourgeoisie can no longer be scientific
and that with the development of the class struggle their economic
science has become "'vulgar" and their ideologists "prize fighters."
He, on the other hand, would show the decline, and then the
workers as changing the world which had long had its interpreters.
It was only in the 1860's, that he changed the very structure of
CAPITAL and placed theories at the end of all volumes. As we
saw, it was in that period that he gave the explanation that what
was written first was put last because that is the ordinary way a
theoretical work develops. That is to say, as an intellectual he
needed to clear his own mind first. Only then comes the creative
part with d1.e workers themselves not only as activists but as
thinkers. Thus, in the same way in which the "Primitive Accumu-
lation of Capital," was placed at the end of Volume I, so the "His-
tory of Theory" (or, Theories of Surplus Value, as Kautsky re-
named it) was put at the end of Volume III, that is to say, at the
end of the entire work.
This is the outline of work as Marx set it down when Volume
I was going to press:
Book I: Process of Production
Book II: Process of Circulation (both of these books were
intended as Volume I, but only Book I was published by Marx
during his lifetime)
Book III: Forms of the Process as a Whole
Book IV: History of Theory
The entire work had been completed when the first Volume
went to press. After the second edition of CAPITAL, Volume I,
Marx reworked Volume II. It is the last piece of work we have
from his pen. If there is any truth at all to the incomplete state
in which Volumes II and III were published, it is the exact opposite
92
 MARXISM AND FREEDOM

of what is implied by those who are so anxious to stress the in-

complete state of the manuscripts. Marx himself tells us how he.
intended to change the manuscripts, or rather the extent to which
he would have changed them, had he lived to edit them himself.
He says, in his letter to Danielson, the Russian translator of Volume
I, not to wait for Volume 11:143 "First of all I would under no
circumstances consent to publish the second volume before the
present English industrial crisis has reached its limit . . . it is
necessary scrupulously to follow the present development of events
to their full maturity before you are in a position 'to utilize' these
facts 'productively,' I mean 'theoretically'. . . .
"Meanwhile-strikes and disturbances everywhere.
"Secondly a tremendous mass of material received by me not
only from Russia but also from the United States, etc., gives me a
pleasant excuse to continue research instead of definitively work-
ing over for publication.
"The United States at present have overtaken England in
the rapidity of economical progress, though they lag behind m the
extent of acquired wealth; but at the same time the masses are
quicker and have greater political means in their hands to resent
the form of a progress accomplished at their expense. I need not
prolong the antitheses."
It is dear that Russia and America were to play the role in
Volumes II and III that England played in Volume I. Lenin
filled it out for Russia. In their attitude to Automation, the
American workers are concretizing this for America.
Marx removed the question of value from a dispute among
intellectuals and transformed it into a question of the struggle of
the proletariat for a new society. The material and the ideal were
never too far apart. 144 He best summarized his own social vision
when he defined the new social order as a society in which "the
free development of each is the condition for the free development
of all," and that never again would the rights of the State be
counterposed to that of the individual. Human freedom is the
principle toward which he worked and his philosophy can be most
fittingly called a New Humanism.
There was no difference between Marx the Hegelian and
Marx the revolutionary, nor between Marx the theoretician and
93
THE LOGIC AND SCOPE OF CAPITAL

Marx the practical organizer. He finished CAPITAL and turned

to the Paris Commune not merely as "'activist" and "materialist"
but as idealist. As we saw, he himself summed up most profoundly
the fact that the ideal is never far from the real when he wrote
that the Communards "have no ideals to realize but to set free
the elements of the new society."

94
 Notes to chapters Five through Eight

48, Despite the mountain of books on the Civil War, its full history is
yet to be written. In the opinion of this author there exists only one serious
work, for example, on the much maligned period of the Reconstruction-
W. E. B. Du Bois' Black Reconstruction. Of necessity I limit myself here
to the impact of the War on the workingmen's movement in Europe and
on Marx's works.
49. Of this great movement too, there is no definitive work. Some of
the best works of the Abolitionists remain in obscure pamphlets, the most
remarkable of which was the one written in 1829 by David Walker. So extra-
ordinary a sensation was caused by the appearance of his pamphlet entitled,
"Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the United States," that legislatures in
the South were called into special session to enact laws against free Negroes
as against slaves for reading it. They put a price of $10,000 on the head of
the author. 50,000 copies of this 76-page pamphlet were sold and circulated
from hand to hand. Those who could not read had others read to them. The
academic historians have yet to bring Walker out of obscurity. The ante-
bellum South trembled at the simple words of this obscure Negro who told
them prophetically that race prejudice would yet "root some of you out of
the very face of the earth."
50, Consult the autobiography of Frederick Douglass. The Communists
hope to ride to glory on the fact that they are publicizing the writings and
works of the great Negro Abolitionists like Frederick Douglass, Sojourner
Truth, Harriet Tubman, and others. The Communists will not succeed. The
proof lies in the spontaneity of today's Negro struggles which completely ignore
them. See American Civilization on Trial: Black Masses as Vanguard (News &
Letters, Detroit, 1963).
51, The text of Phillips' speech, entitled, "The Cabinet," can be found
in Wendell Phillips, Speeches, Lectures and Letters, first published in Boston,
1864, and difficult to obtain. Fortunately, many of these will soon appear
in a book by Oscar Sherwin, Prophet of Liberty; The Life and Times of
Wendell Phillips. _
52. The Civil War in the United States, by Karl Marx, pp. 279-80.
53. Interestingly enough a non-Marxist Hegelian group came to the sup-
port of the North. It was the famous "St. Louis group" of intellectuals who,
having become critical of the philosophies of Emerson and Thoreau, or-
ganized themselves for the study of Hegel's works. Led by the New Englander,
W. T. Harris and the German emigrant, Brokmeyer, they made the first
English translation of Hegel's Science of Logic; by 1867 they founded the
first definitely philosophical periodical in this country, "The Journal of
Speculative Philosophy." (See A History of American Philosophy by Herbert
W. Schneider, Columbia University Press, 1946). Brockmeyer, incidentally,
later became Lieutenant-Governor of Missouri.
News & Letters has since published Then and Now: On the JOOth Anniversary
of the First General Strike in the U.S. (Detroit, 1977) which takes up the St.
Louis Hegelians and the two decades, 1857-1877.
u. CAPITAL, Vol. I, p. 329. All references to this work are to the standard
Charles H. Kerr edition. Capital, Vol. I, Pelican Marx Library(Penguin Books,
London, 1976), p. 415.
55, Marx and Engels: The Civil War in the United States, p. 252.
56, More popularly known as the Critique of Political Economy.
57, Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, pp.
llll-34.

95
 58. Grundrisse der Kritik der Politischen Otkonomie, 1857-1858. Available
only in German. .Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute, .Moscow, 1939. It is a sad
commentaTy on rne state ot cont::!mporary .'llar:vist scholarship that these have
yet to be analyzed.
The Grundrisse has recently been published in English in a Pelican Marx Library
edition (Penguin Books, London, 1973 \. See also Philosophy and Revolution,
Chapter 2, Section. B, "The 1850s: The Grundrisse, Then and Now."
59. Letter from Marx Lo Engels, January 8. 1868.
60 CAPITAL, Vol. I, p. 297. Pelican, p. 382.
61 "What a distance we have tra\clc<l." C..\PIT..\L, Vol. I, p. 330. Pelican, p.
416.
fl~. Sec Engels' Preface to C.-\PIT..\L, Volume II.
63 CAPITAL. Vol. I, p. 239, ftn. 2. Pelican, p. 324, ftn. 3.
64. This material has never been published in the exact form in which
Marx left it. In 190!\, Karl Kautsky, to whom Engels entrusted the manu-
script. Look some liberties with the structure and published it under the
title The Theorie.~ of SurfJlus T'alue. To this day, except for one volume
published in the United States under the title, A History of Economic Doc-
1rine. the work is unavailable in English. For the past decade, the Russian
Communists. who now own the manuscript, have been promising to publish
it in its original form. but they have not done so Theories of Sur11lus Value
has since heen puhlishe<!_ (1969) hy Pro11;ress Publishers, Moscow.
6~. See Appendix B.
The reference is to the first edition of Marxism and Freedom. which included
a~ Appendix B my translation of Lenin's "Abstract of Hegel's Science of Logic,"
which has since been puhli~hed in Vol. 38 of Lenin's Collected Works (Foreign
Languages, Moscow, 1961).
66 The Civil War in France, (included in Selecled Works, Vol. II).
G7 The Civil War in France.
68 This does not appear in the English editions. The International Pub-
lishers edition, edited by Dona Torr, does include ~ome material from
the French edition that is not in the standard Charles H. Kerr edition.
The new Pelican edition does include all prefaces and postfares.
69. CAPITAL, Vol. I, p. 82. Pelican, p. 164.
70. Speech at tlu' A1wi11ersary of the Pf:OPLE'S PAPEn, April 1856,
(included in SelcctPd ll'orhs, \'ol. ll).
71. CAPITAL, Vol. I, p. 93, footnote. Pelican, p. 174.
12 CAPITAL, Vol. I, p. 689. Pelican, p. 779.
73. Civil War i11 Fra11ce, (included in Selected Works, Vol. II).
14 CAPITAL, \'ol. I, p. 48. Pelican, p. 132.
75. CorresjJondeua of Marx and Engels, letter of August 24, 1867.
7G. Critique, p. 299.
11. CAPITAL, Vol. I, p. 195-196. Pelican, p. 280.
7 M. CAP IT AL, Vol. I, p. 258. Pelican, p. 342.
711. CAP IT AL, Vol. I, pp. 357-8. Pelican, p. 443.
so. CAPITAL, Vol. I, p. 361. Pelican, p. 447.
81 Poverty of Philosophy, p. 15i.
82. CAPITAL, Vol. I, p. 364. Pelican, p. 450.
83 ".-\ work of art that wants the right form is for that very reason
no right or true work of art. ... Real works of art are those where content
and form exhibit a thorough identity . . . . The content of Romeo and
Juliet may similarly be said to be the ruin of two lovers through the dis-
cord between their families: but something more is needed to make Shake·
speare's immortal trage<ly."-Hegel's Logic, p. 243.
84. See Hegel on 'The Third Attitude to Objectivity": "What I dis·

96
cover in my consciousness is thus exaggerated into a fact of the consciousness
o_f all and even passed off for the very nature of the mind." (Hegel's Logic,
~irst. \Vallac~ translation; in the second, more accessible edition, the wording
1s slightly different, see page 134.)
1':'.I. C.-\.PrrAL, Vol. I, p. 654, footnote. Pelican, p. 744, ftn. 29.
-8~. _Archives of Marx and Engel.s, Russian edition, Vol. II, (VII), p. 69.
1 lus is the famous "Chapter VI," or original ending of CAPIT ..\L, when it
was in manuscript form. Chapter Six has been translated into English and is
published in the Pelican Marx Library edition of Vol. I, "Results of the Immedi
ate Process of Production," pp. 949-1084.
87, Ibid., p. 35.
88, CAPITAL, Vol. I, p. 217. Pelican, p. 302.
89, CAP ITAL, Vol. I, p. 327. Pelican, p. 412.
90, CAPITAL, Vol. I, p. 463. Pelican, p. 549.
91, CAPITAL, Vol. I, p. 53. Pelican, p. 37.
92 Philosophy of Manufacture.
93, CAPITAL, Vol. I, p. 476. Pelican, p. 563.
94. CAPITAL, Vol. I, p. 787. Pelican, p. 876.
95. CAPITAL, Vol. I, p. 823. Pelican, p. 915.
96. CAPITAL, Vol. I, p. 533. Pelican, p. 618.
97. CAPITAL, Vol. I, p. 534. Pelican, p. 618.
98, CAPITAL, Vol. I, p. 671. Pelican, p. 762.
99. CAPITAL, Vol. I, p. 636. Pelican, p. 727.
100. CAPITAL, Vol. I, p. 640. Pelican, p. 730.
101 CAPITAL, Vol. I, pp. 836-837. Pelican, p. 929.
102. CAPITAL, Vol. I, pp. 836·7. Pelican, p. 929.
103 CAPITAL, Vol. I, p. 690. Pelican, p. 784.
104 CAPITAL. Vol. I, p. 693. Different as the situation appeared in Hitler's
Germany and in 5talin's Russia, the capitalist law of population held true, al-
though unemployment assumed a very different shape. See \'art V. Pelican, pp.
783-4.
105 In the iinal edition, the part became separate chapters of l'art VII.
lOH. C~\PIT ..\L, Vol. I, p. 837. Pelican, p. 929.
101 CAPITAL, Vol. I, p. 708. Pelican, p. 799.
108. CAPITAL, Vol. I, p. 709. Pelican, p. 799.
109. CAPITAL, Vol. I, p. 837. Peiican, p. 929.
110. CAPITAL, Vol. I, p. 835. Pelican, p. 929.
111 CAPITAL, Vol. I, p. 649. Pelican, p. 928.
112 This analysis includes also Theories of Surplus Value, which l\Iarx had
intended as Book IV of Vol. III (of CAPITAL), but which have not been
translated into English to this day, except for the first pa1·t. (See footnote 64).
113. It wasn't only the Marxists who saw that this division had more
theoretic sense than all that political economy has produced on the question
of the "market," After the 1929 crash, some academic economists realized that
if they were going to get any distance in understanding the crisis, they
.would have to understand production better. By 1942, Joan Robinson as-
serted that with this division 0£ total output into two, and only two maJor
groups, Marx had devised "a simple and penetrating argument." (Cf. Joan
Robinson, An Essay 011 Marxia11 Economics, p. 51.)
114. Theories of Surplus Value, Vol. I, Part II, p. 170, Russian ed.
115, CAPITAL, Vol. Ill, p. 396.
116, CAPITAL, Vol. I, p. 647. Pelican, p. 736.
117. CAPITAL, Vol. II, pp. 475-6.
118 Chapter I ot V.I. Lenin, The Develop111e11l of Capitalism in Russia,
Russian edition. This chapter has been omitted from the English edition.

97
My translation of this chapter appears in New International, Octo~er, Novembe;,
and December, 1943, available in the Raya Dunayev~kaya Collection, on deposit
with the Labor History Archives of Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan.
119, \Vhat complicated the argument. was that most of her critics were
reformists. She, however, attacked both reformists and revolutionaries in-
discriminately, and labeled all her critics "epigoncs."
120, Page 401, Russian edition.
121, Theories of Surplus Value, Vol. II, Part II, page 161, Russian edition.
122, CAPITAL, Volume I, page 810. Pelican, p. 900.
123, Engels, Herr Eugen Diihring's Revolution in Science. A shortened and
popular version of it, "Socialism, Utopian and Scientific," is included in
Selected Works, Vol. II.
124, CAPITAL, Vol. I, p. 842, the Dona Torr, International Publishers
edition. Pelican, p. 105.
125, Nothing is simple these days. In 1931 Russia found out that, although
she had complete monopoly of everything including sales, her tractors just
couldn't "compete," that is to say, stand up in production. To buy tracto1s
from Ford meant, however, to pay in gold-standard money at a time when
the agricultural crisis in her country made it impossible to have agricultural
products to sell to get the money. At another time when she wanted to
dump wheat on the international market she found doors closed there. See
Part V.
126, Hegel, "Logic," Paragraph 81, p. 148.
127. Letter of July 11, 1868.
128, CAPITAL, Volume I, page 59. Pelican, p. 142,
129, CAPITAL, Volume I, p. 708. Pelican, p. 798.
130, CAPITAL, Volume II, pp. 132-133.
131, CAPITAL, Volume III, p. 58.
132. CAPITAL, Volume III, page 966.
133. CAPITAL, Vol. I, p. 647. Pelican, p. 737.
lU. CAPITAL, Vol. I, p. 239. Pelican, p. 324, ftn. 3.
135. CAPITAL, Vol. Ill, p. 568.
136, Grundrisse
137, CAPITAL, Vol. III, pp. 954-955.
138. CAP ITAL, Vol. II, p. 503.
139. CAPITAL, Vol. 111, p. 955.
140, Grundrisse, p. 596, German only, (see footnote 58).
141 Originally, Marx had intended to end Volume I with a Chapter VI,
entitled, "The Direct Results of the Process of Production," which would
have summed up the volume simply and made the transition to Volume II
without anticipating its problems and results. Then, both because of health
and because of his deepened comprehension of the subject, he rewrote the
last part as the "Accumulation of Capital." It was this section, again, which
had undergone the greatest revision for the second edition of CAP IT AL.
The original ending can be found in the Archives of Marx-Engels, Vol. II (VII),
both in the original German and in Russian translation. The best way to
follow the changes in "Accumulation of Capital," is to get the Dona Torr
edition which singles out the changed passages and publishes them separately
at the end of the volume. The Kerr edition, which is the standard edition
and which has been used here, publishes the French edition as corrected by
Marx, but the changes are not singled out.
Marx's "Accumulation of Capital," in Volume I, anticipates Volumes II and
III, in the same manner in which the "Absolute Idea," in Hegel's Science of
Logic, anticipates the Philosophy of Nature, and Philosophy of Mind, which

98
ultimately completed his philosophic system. Marx's letter to S. Meyer, April
30, 1867, on his health, says: "I laugh at the so-called 'practical' men and
their wisdom. If one chose to be an ox one could of course turn one's back
on the agonies of mankind and look after one's own skin. But I should real!~
have regarded myself as unpractical if I had pegged out without completely
finishing my book, at least in the manuscript."
142. Joseph A. Schumpeter, A History of Economic Analysis.
143. Letter of April 10, 1879; Letters on Capital, Russian edition.

99
 APPENDIX
Tony Cliff Reduces Lenin's Theory
To "Uncanny lntuition" 1
If Marx did not leave behind him a "Logic" (with
a capital letter), he did leave the logic of Capital
. . • Intelligent idealism is closer to intelligent ma-
terialism than stupid materialism. Dialectical ideal-
ism instead of intelligent; metaphysical, undeveloped,
dead, crude, rigid instead of stupid."
Lenin, Philosophic Notebooks2
To grasp the meaning of Lenin's book [Imperial-
ism], unlike that of let us say, Rosa Luxemburg's
(The Accumulation of Capital) or Hilferding's, one
does not have to be familiar with Marxist economic
writings.
Tony Cliff, Lenin, Vol. Two (pp. 59-60)

M ARX'S CAPITAL has gone on many adventures after the

author's death, 1883. These became tortuous after the death
of his lifelong collaborator, Engels, 1895. The first revolutionary to
question Marx's theory of expanded reproduction was the very one -
Rosa Luxemburg - who, with her brilliant pamphlet, Reform or
Revolution?, had bested the revisionists who challenged Marx's "economic
theories" and accused them of being weighted down by a "dialectical
scaffolding." It wasn't that Luxemburg ever denied that battle of ideas,

1 Tony Cliff, Lenin, Vol. Two, All Power to the Soviets (Pluto Press, London,
1976), p. 378. Pagination references to this book will appear directly in the
following text.
2 Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 38 (Foreign Languages, Moscow, 1961), p. 319.
The references to Lenin's works in my text which follows, as in my preceding
Introduction, cite this volume. In the preceding chapters on Capital, however,
the references were to my own translation of Lenin, which was published as
"Appendix B" to the 1958 edition of Marxism and Freedom, as no "official" trans-
lation was then available. I was the first to translate into English Lenin's "Abstract
of Hegel's Science of Logic." When Moscow finally published Lenin's Philosophic
Notebooks in English, they not only left out Adoratsky's Introduction to the first
Russian edition of 1930, but also the Lenin lnstitute's listing of what books Lenin
called for, not just in Bern, 1914-16, but in Russia after taking power. It bears
repeating Adoratsky: "Despite the fact . . . of the extreme situation and the
necessity to give all attention and all energy to practical questions, Lenin continued
to interest himself in questions of philosophy. This is evident from his readings
. . . On June 24, 1921, he asked for a Russian translation of Hegel's Logic and
Phenomenology of Mind . . • Lenin not only read but wrote on the question and
philosophy. Nine-tenths of the remarks on Bukharin's Economics of the Transition
Period concern the question of method."
100
but the horrid emergence of imperialism from the latest capitalist de-
velopment led Luxemburg to question "what" Engels "made out of"
the manuscripts Marx had left for Vols. II and III of Capital, especially
Vol. II. In any case, the debates over her greatest theoretical work,
The Accumulation of Capital (1913) - whether it was, as she claimed,
a "supplement," or a revision - were still on when the greatest of all
shockers befell Marxist revolutionaries: the betrayal of the German
Social Democracy at the outbreak of World War I.

Under the circumstances, Lenin (who had made an outline of his

critique of Luxemburg's work which he considered a new version of
underconsumptionism not unlike the Narodniki3) changed his mind. In-
stead, he embarked on something totally new, and totally apart from what
all other Marxist revolutionaries who had not betrayed were doing. Lenin,
at one and the same time, along with taking the most extreme anti-war
position, calling for the transformation of the imperialist war into a
civil war, plunged into the study of Hegel's Science of Logic. Oh, yes,
Capital was still the theoretic determinant, but Lenin was not arguing
on the basis of what he or any other Marxist had written about it.
Instead, Lenin proceeded to probe Marx's own roots in the Hegelian
dialectic.
No doubt, his colleagues, had they known what he was doing in the
Bern library when the world was, literally, going to pieces, would have
thought it a strange sight to see him poring over Hegel's Science of Logic
and concluding all Marxists (himself included, obviously) had not "com-
pletely" understood Marx's Capital, "especially its first chapter," since
"it is impossible" to do so "without having thoroughly studied and
understood the whole of Hegel's Logic" (p. 180). Later Lenin hit out
especially hard against "the father of Marxism" in Russia, so recognized
by all, especially Lenin, as the greatest Marxist philosopher:

"Plekhanov wrote on philosophy (dialectics) probably about 1,000

pages . . . Among them, about the larger Logic, in connection
with it, its thought (i.e., dialectics proper, as philosophical science)
nil!!" (p. 277)

Long before Lenin had reached the end of the Science of Logic,
he experienced a shock, not of betrayal, as with the German Social
Democrats and with Plekhanov, but of recognition. Here is how Lenin
first expressed his elation:

3 Leninski Sbornik, Vol. 22 (Russian only) contains his outline of the article
he intended to write. See following text, p. 105, for further detail. "The Theoretic
Mistakes of the Narodniki" was, originally, Chapter 1 of Lenin's first major work,
The Development of Capitalism in Russia. (Since that chap'ter had been left out
of the English edition, I translated it during my debates on state-capitalism. See
New International, October, November and December, 1943.)
101
 "Movement and 'self-movement' (this NB!) ... who would believe
this is the core of 'Hegelianism,' of abstract and abstruse (pon·
derous, absurd?) Hegelianism? ? . . . The idea of universal
movement and change ( 1813 Logic) was conjectured before its
application to life and society. In regard to society ·it was pro·
claimed earlier ( 1847) [Communist Manifesto] than it was
de19lmstrated in application to man ( 1859) [Origin of Species]."
(p. 141)
From then on, Lenin began to work out the integrality of philosophy
and Marx's economic categories. Thus: "Hegel's analysis of syllogisms-
U (niversal), P(articular), l(ndividual) - recalls Marx's imitation of
Hegel in Chapter I [of Capital]" (p. 178). As we see, it was not just
a question any longer of contrasting Essence vs. Appearance, which all
Marxists had heen ready to accept, along with "the materialist concep·
tion of history" as signifying economic structure as basic vs. ideological
superstructure, or production as more fundamental than the market. No,
by then Lenin was in the "idealist" Doctrine of the Notion.
Indeed, Lenin was to stop longest in the final chapter, "The Absolute
Idea," precisely because he had worked out so new a relationship of
ideal to real that he could write: "Alias: Man's consciousness not only
reflects the objective world, hut creates it" (p. 212). Which didn't mean
that Lenin went up into the wild blue yonder. Quite the contrary. Every
writing he then embarked on became the theoretic preparation for pro·
letarian revolution. His philosophic break became the Great Divide in
Marxism.
He no sooner finished reading the Science of Logic than on January
5, 1915, he addressed a letter to Encyclopaedia Granat, for which he had
written the essay, "Karl Marx." He was trying to recall it in order to
make "certain corrections in the section on dialectics . . . I have been
studying this question of dialectics for the last month and a half and I
could add something to it if there was time . . ." Evidently there was
no time - or at least the bourgeois Granat found no time - to allow
Lenin to make his correction. Lenin then decided that he no longer
could accept any other Marxist's analysis of imperialism, although he
had just a few months earlier favorably introduced Bukharin's study
of imperialism and the world economy.

C ONTRAST THIS hist.ory to Tony Cliff's listings. His chronology

does list: "23 August/5 September: Lenin arrives in Berne
(Switzerland)" - and then proceeds to mention that Lenin presented
his thesis on war to a Bolshevik conference. But neither there, nor in
the whole 411 pages of text, Notes and Index of his second volume of
the three-volume study of Lenin does Tony Cliff utter a single word that
102
Lenin repaired to the library to study Hegel's Science of Logic and that
Lenin's "Abstract of Hegel's Logic" took from September to· Dec. 17,
1914, to complete 4 - after which followed 1915 and more "On· Dialec-
tics," and everything from Imperialism to Marxism and the State, the
first version of State and Revolution.
Tony Cliff's Lenin is a most curious compilation. Though subtitled
"All Power to the Soviets," and although it follows the first volume
which already had centered on "Building The Party" (and is so sub-
titled), it is that same vanguardist theme that permeates Vol. Two as
well. Indeed, the Foreword explains that the reason for the book, when
Trotsky's ·monumental History of the Russian Revolution had already
covered that period so magnificently, is the latter's "serious defect":
"The one thing noticeably missing is the Bolshevik Party: its rank ·and
file, its cadres, its local committees, its Central Committee" (p. ix).
So weighted down is Tony Cliff with the concept of the vanguard
party to lead and the "calibre of leadership," that he does not deigii so
much as to mention the philosophic break Lenin experienced at the
shock of the simultaneity .of the outbreak of World War I and the col-
lapse of the Second International, and that all his political battles, not
only with the Social Democrats who betrayed hut with his Bolshevik
co-leaders who didn't betray, were grounded in his new concept of
dialectics.
A Marxist economist like Tony Cliff is so little concerned with
Ifegelian dialectics 62 years after Lenin's break that he fails to see the
relevance of Lenin's study· of Hegelian dialectics either to Marx's
"economic" works or to Lenin's Imperialism. The miniscule Chapter 4,
of five pages, Tony Cliff devotes to the question, with the excuse that
he will deal with it in his third volume "which will deal with the Com-
munist International." He will then develop his theory (his, not Lenin's,
analysis of imperialism) . He, of course, has a perfect right to his own
views of imperialism. But that cannot be used as ground for not facing
Lenin's theory at the time when, and the manner in which Lenin de-
veloped it. He only thereby proves that eclecticism, bereft of methodology,
cannot appreciate methodology in others, in Lenin especially, because
his own so totally .deviates from 'that revolutionary vision which is in-

4 In Vol. One, (Lenin: Building The Party, 1975), Cliff does have one single
reference (p. 291) to "dialectically terse and lively Philosophic Notebooks" at
the point where he criticizes Materialism and Empirio-Criticism. One would have
thought that, even if Cliff had no time for concretizing his terse single statement
on the Notebooks, his preoccupation with the Party should have led him to see
that, Stalinist detractors notwithstanding, Lenin himself had not a word on "party-
ness of philosophy." Instead, Cliff's point is that it was supposedly only "in the
period of reaction after the revolution" that "Marxist philosophy inevitably came
to the fore" (Vol. One, p. 289). No wonder he could not see the Notebooks as
Lenin's philosophic preparation for revolution.
103
separable from the concept of revolutionary Subject (the proletariat) as
lioth force and Reason.
The ground for this reductionist attitude to Lenin as theoretician
was, in fact, laid in Tony Cliff's first volume, where Cliff writes: "It was
:hardly an exaggeration for the Bolshevik historian M. N. Pokrovsky to
write, 'You will not find in Lenin a single purely theoretical work; each
:has a propaganda aspect.' "5 Whatever it was the "Bolshevik"6 meant hy
"purely theoretical," it is clear that what Tony Cliff thinks of as "pure
theory" is "pure economics."
Thus, when he does deign to praise Lenin, he condescendingly
stresses that Lenin's writing a "popular pamphlet does not mean that
he did not work hard on it," and then points to the fact that, as against
the "booklet" Imperialism, the Notebooks on Imperialism are "a massive
739 pages," stressing especially that Lenin "read and annotated 148 hooks
and 232 articles" (p. 59). For Tony Cliff, the unfortunate part here is
that, very obviously, he has not7 read those 739 pages. Had he read
them8, he would have seen that, from the start, Lenin was hy no means
only out for data, though that is massive, hut had read philosophic works,
from Lange's History of Materialism to Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind.
Whether Lenin had made as copious notes of the Phenomenology as
of the Science of Logic we cannot know, as the Moscow Institute did not
bother to inform us whether Lenin made them and they were lost, or he
never annotated it. But there is no doubt that he had read it, and there
is no doubt that the "phenomenon" of imperialism, and the "attitude"
to it, owes much to the work. (Incidentally, Lenin had also made careful
note, in his "Abstract of Hegel's Science of Logic," of the references
Hegel himself made to his Phenomenology, which He-gel originally
conceived as the "Introduction" to Logic.)
Tony Cliff remains unmoved, deaf to the integrality of philosophy
in Marx's or Lenin's economic works. He is so preoccupied with "the
breadth of analysis of Luxemburg or Hilferding," not to mention Buk-

5 Cliff, Lenin, Vol. One, p. 256.

6 Outside of the fact that, having belonged before World War I to Trotsky's
Mezhrayontsy Onterdistrict) organization and afterward, becoming a complete
Stalinist, Pokrovsky wasn't exactly an "Old Bolshevik" in the traditional sense, he
does fit Lenin's reason for not attributing "significance to the desire to hold on to
the word 'Bolshevism,' for I know some 'old Bolsheviks' from whom may God
preserve me." ("The Nascent Tendency of 'Imperialist Economism'" was Lenin's
reply to Bukharin. This thesis, along with Bukharin's, Trotsky's and all tendencies
within the Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, etc. is included in The Bolsheviks and the
World War, by Olga Hess Gankin and H. H. Fisher (Stanford University, Cali-
fornia, 1940), which remains the best compilation of documents for that period.
7 Cliff's reference is not to the Notebooks on Imperialism, but to a May,
1959 article by L. G. Churchwood in The Australian Journal of Politics and
History.
8 Notebooks on Imperialism (Russian edition), Moscow, 1939, p. 3.
104
harin, that he brings out this further "proof" of Lenin's failure of a
theoretical grasp - "the realization of surplus value, which for Rosa
Luxemburg became so central, [is) not even mentioned in Lenin's book-
let," and that, my dear readers, Tony Cliff assures us, "is not accidental"
(p. 60).
Now it is hard to believe that the erudite Tony Cliff, who is penning
a three-volume study of Lenin, has not bothered to acquaint himself
with what Lenin thought of Luxemburg's Accumulation of Capital. He
has left himself the loophole of revealing all in the as-yet-unpublished
Vol. Three of Lenin. But he would first then again violate the historic
chronology. In any case, let me help him find it. In Leninski Sbomik,
Vol. 22, pp. 343-348, Lenin commented on Luxemburg's work soon after
it was published in 19139. He outlines what he intends to write in his
critique:
"ROSA LUXEMBURG'S UNSUCCESSFUL SUPPLEMENT TO
MARXIST THEORY
For example:
I. 14 years ago. The Narodniks against the Marxists. Legal
Marxists and Social Democrats.
II. R. Luxemburg's Perversion.
III. Posing 0£ the theoretical problem.
IV. Rosa Luxemburg's ("supplement"). Criticism.
Anti-criticism.
V. Rosa Luxemburg's "supplement." A failure.
VI. Dialectics and eclectics.
VII. Imperialism and realization of surplus value. (Rothstein,
etc.)"
Lenin's Essay on Karl Marx is, of course, also a "popular pamphlet,"
so it may not have interested Tony Cliff, but there, too, Lenin lists
Luxemburg's Accumulation of Capital in his bibliography of Marxist
works as "an incorrect interpretation of Marxist theory." And if Tony
Cliff insists on "purely theoretical" works, then do please let him read
Lenin's "Theoretic Mistakes of the Narodniki," not to mention Im-
perialism. Yes, Imperialism.
Instead, Cliff leads up to Chapter 4 hy telling us (in the chapter
on the National Question) that "many of the leading ,comrades in
Russia did not understand why Lenin was so vehement in his opposition
to Bukharin" (p. 56 footnote), and in the very chapter on Imperialism,
skips to Lenin's Will (12/23-24/1922) to quote Lenin on Bukharin as

9 I have reproduced more of Lenin's Commentary from Sbornik, Vol. 22, in

my debates on Luxemburg in New International, March, 1943. My 1944 critique
of Luxemburg's Accumulation of Capital was reproduced on the lOOth anniversary
of the publication of Marx's Capital, as Appendix to my State-Capitalism and
Marx's Humanism (News & Letters, 1967).
105
1he "biggest theoretician," without so much as mentioning that a "but"
:follows:
"hut his [Bukharin's] theoretical views can only with the very
greatest doubt be regarded as fully Marxian, for there is some-
thing scholastic in him. (He has never learned, and I think never
fully understood, the dialectic.) "

W HAT IS THIS dialectic that made Lenin say - and not just
in a polemical way, but in his Will - that his Bolshevik co-
leader, Bukharin, who had never betrayed, who was always a revolution-
ary, who was, in fact, "the favorite of the whole party" and a "major
theoretician," was "not fully a Marxist" because he had "never fully
understood the dialectic"? The very work that Tony Cliff considers
so theoretically superior to Lenin's popularization was the one that Lenin
had first introduced favorably, but after grappling with Hegel's dialectic,
found so non-dialectical that he undertook his own study. Lenin reiterated
his departure from Bukharin's "economism" also after conquest of power,
when Bukharin's Economics of the Transition PeriodlO once again
demonstrated a lack of "dialectics," that is to say, disregard of the pro-
letariat as Reason, as Subject.
Secondly, and foremost, Lenin found Bukharin's opposition to self.
determination not just bereft of the "dialectic of history," but so total an
impediment to working with new national revolutionary forces, such as
the Irish revolutionaries, that he designated Bukharin's position as nothing
short of "imperialist economism" ! Again Lenin had to repeat his op:
position to Bukharin's stand against self-determination after conquest
of power, both in his debates on the new Program of the Party, and on
the International.
Tony Cliff's singular empiricism - like all empiricism, bereft of
all methodology - is beyond comprehending Lenin's theory - theory,
not just a "popular outline." By leaving out Lenin's Philosophic Note-
books, Cliff not only skips over "philosophy," hut the dialectics of liber-
ation as self-developing Subject, that is to say, the actual masses in revolt.
Thus, by no accident whatever, in the chapter on the "National Question,"
on which Cliff is supposed to agree with Lenin, not Bukharin, he has not
a word to say about the Irish Revolution. Whether or not that, too, has
been left by Tony Cliff for "Volume Three," it nevertheless was the
concrete "topic" under discussion. What was decisive then were live
revolutionaries. Their appearance on the historic stage had sharpened
to a fever pitch all the tendencies fighting Lenin's theoretic position.

10 The English translation of Bukharin's Economics of the Transition Period

(Bergman Publishers, N.Y., 1971) includes Lenin's Critical Remarks of the work.
106
 Tony Cliff chooses to begin the discussion on the National Question
with the position of the Austrian Socialists in the 19th century, but it
was not that debate, nor even Poland, 1912, when the National Question
was still debated just as "principle," nor the Bund, that was at issue
during World War I. Though Cliff still keeps away from referring to the
Easter Rebellion, he is finally forced to quote Lenin:
"The dialectics of history are such that small nations, powerless
as an independent factor in the struggle against imperialism, play
a part as one of the ferments, one of the bacilli, which help the
real anti-imperialist force, the socialist proletariat, to make its
appearance on the scene."
But meanwhile they hadn't; 1917 was still to be. And when it did
come, it was preceded by Lenin's State and Revolution that was first
begun in those same critical years, 1914-16, when Lenin was grappling
with Hegelian dialectics as philosophy, as politics, as economics, as self.
developing Subject. "The dialectics proper" - Lenin's phrase - had to
be shown as "the living tree of living, fertile, genuine, powerful, omni-
potent, objective, absolute human knowledge" (p. 363).
Having eliminated this from his study of Lenin, it is no wonder
that Tony Cliff reached the climax of his comprehension - I mean non-
comprehension - of Lenin by singling out Lenin's "uncanny intuition.
In a period of great changes, the number of unknown factors, not only
in the enemy camp, but also in our own, is so great that sober analysis
alone will not suffice. An unsurpassed ability to detect the mood of the
masses was Lenin's most important gift." This reductionism, we must
remember, is not something said only in Chapter 4 devoted to "Imperial-
ism," or on any other single subject, but in the very last chapter, "Lenin
Calls Up the Insurrection," on the penultimate page.
Cliff doesn't get any less arrogant as he moves from Chapter 4 to
attributing "uncanny intuition" to Lenin in Chapter 19, praising "stra-
tegy" on the ultimate page of his work, where he writes: "The crucible
of October furnished the supreme test of his [Lenin's] strategy and of the
calibre of his leadership of the party and the class" (p. 379).

I T IS OF LITTLE matter whether Tony Cliff ever frees himself from

the unbridgeable gulf he has dug between theory and practice,
economics and politics, philosophy and revolution, as well as between
leadership and ranks, and whether he will finally (i.e., in the last volume)
attribute "theory" to Lenin's new universal that the population "to a man,
woman and child" either controls production and the state, or we return
"back to capitalism." Lenin's admonition to the party, that socialism
cannot, can not, "be introduced by a minority, a party," will stand:
107
 "Every citizen to a man must act as a judge and participate in the
government of the country, and what is most important to us is to
enlist all the toilers to a man in the government of the state. That
is a tremendously difficult task hut socialism cannot he introduced
hy a minority, a party."11
What does matter is that these points of departure in theory and
practice have not become ground for working out what is urgent for our
age, not only on the integrality of philosophy in economics, hut in the
relationship of spontaneity to organization. Elsewherel2 I have shown
that, though too many who consider themselves Marxists are forever
clinging to the Party, Party, Party - as if Lenin had clung to the 1902
Social Democratic vanguard party concept unchanged - Lenin had
actually changed his views many times. What is crucial here is what
has happened in our age.
Lenin's break with his philosophic past began with Marx's Capital
in hand, came to fruition the same way in the greatest proletarian
revolution, and ended in the same way as he hit out against Bukharin's
"economism" and lack of dialectics. Very obviously, Marx's Capital's
adventures haven't ended yet, and no doubt will not end until we ac·
tually have achieved classless society on truly human foundations. But
isn't it high time, 53 years after Lenin's death and all the aborted and
incompleted revolutions since, that we at least rediscovered what Lenin
had learned about the relationship of dialectics to economics, politics,
revolution - in a word, dialectics of thought and dialectics of liberation?
Irrespective of the correctness or "incorrectness" of what the position on
any single issue was, or what later data occurred, shouldn't revolutionary
Marxists instead be preoccupied with whether we are headed in the
direction Marx thought was the goal - "the development of human
power which is its own end, the true realm of freedom ..."13

11 Lenin, Selected Works, Vol. VIII, p. 320. What is crucial also is Vol. IX,
especially Lenin's debates with Bukharin and Trotsky on the Trade Unions.
12 For the period 1903-1923, see Marxism and Freedom, Ch. XI, "Forms of
Organization: The Relationship of the Spontaneous Self-Organization of the Pro-
letariat to the 'Vanguard Party'" and Ch. XII, "What Happens After." For the
latest on the whole question of spontaneity and apartidarismo (anti-partyism),
the Portuguese Revolution is most important. See Portugal: Key Documents of
the Revolutionary Process which reproduces many documents and manifestoes of
the Portuguese Revolution (People's Translation Service, 1735 Allston Way, Ber-
keley, Cal. 94703). See also my analysis "Will the Revolution in Portugal
Advance?" (News & Letters, Jan.-Feb., 1976) and Perspectives 1977-78, "It's
Later, Always Later - except when spontaneity upsurges and you realize it
is here and now, and you aren't there and ready," published by News & Letters.
13 Marx, Capital, Vol. III, p. 954.
108
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